X-Men: Sons of Logan (Book Two: Tempest)
by Hori
Summary: With the Sons of Logan scattered and defeated, what hope does humanity have to resist the will of Mister Sinister and his coming mutant empire? Can the Wolverine's last disciples rally their strength and rise up to face their greatest challenge yet? Read and find out!
1. Intro and Index

**_We're back, guys and gals._**

**_If you're just checking this story out of sheer curiosity, I recommend you read the first book of this series, as this is a direct sequel, and none of this will make sense without having read the opening segment of the planned trilogy._**

**_I'm happy to be working on SoL again, and I'm excited to show you what I've come up with to continue the saga of Logan's last students._**

**_For anyone that might need some brushing up, I've made a sort of character index in this document for you to refer to, should the need arise. I'll add more entries as more characters emerge in the story._**

**_Please enjoy book two of the Sons of Logan trilogy: Tempest._**

**_(Now credit where it's due: X-Men and related characters and storylines are property of Marvel Entertainment. Original characters have either been created by me or submitted by members._**

**_Thank you to All Knowing 1, smileyface1627, BitchAmI, HMMaster, Dracarot, XxxCloudyxxX, and ReaderBot3000 for your submissions.)_**

**_Hori out._**

* * *

**The Sons of Logan**

**_Vascha 'Black' Aleksandrov_** – A black-skinned, Russian umbrakinetic with the ability to metabolize light. Master in knife-fighting and proficient in most forms of combat. She was killed in the Sons of Logan's first encounter with Mr. Sinister. Vascha was the tactical leader of the group.

**_Tömörbaatar 'Ambush' Gansükh_** – A Mongolian hunter with an impressive camouflage ability. Gansükh is the long-range combat specialist of the group, able to make nearly impossible shots with his sniper rifle. Despite his self-assured, humorous, and reserved nature, he does not wear the vestments of command well, and is more comfortable being a part of a plan rather than orchestrating one.

**_Hunter 'Zephyr' Burden_** – As Ororo Munroe's grand-nephew, Hunter is one of the few mutants remaining on the planet with a direct connection to the now-disbanded X-Men. Elemental control seems to run in the family, as he is an accomplished aerokinetic, able to bend the air to his will. He often feels the need to push himself harder than the others in an attempt to live up to his familial legacy.

**_Ben 'Artez' Levine_** – An Israeli-born terrakinetic, Ben is the most secretive and guarded of his comrades. He is one of the few Sons of Logan with a family to return to, even though he has made a personal vow not to return to them until he can be sure of their safety; Something that has been impossible for years. Though he often served as a de-facto second-in-command to Vascha, without her he is unsure of his role on the team.

_**Rin 'Echo' Fujisaki**_ – Though she was born blind, Rin's remaining senses are heightened to preternatural levels, arguably giving her a better understanding of her surroundings than many normal humans. This sensitivity has granted her extraordinary skills with swords, which she much prefers to her offensive mutant power: The ability to project super-sonic screams. Normally, she is a perfect example of demure calmness, but in a fight, she is a living tornado of carnage.

_**Ciara 'Espen' Monetti**_ – Perhaps the most devoted of Logan's followers, Ciara's animalisitic powers and reverence for her fallen master make her prone to the same form of berzerker rages that Logan himself suffered from. She is a close-quarters-combat specialist and escape artist, and values her space and solitude. Her status is unknown, but she is believed to have been killed in action.

_**Madame Yuriko**_ – One of Logan's oldest friends and former lover, Yuriko is the head of a once-powerful yakuza clan, and allowed Logan to train his disciples after the majority of the X-Men had been scattered. Even near eighty years old, she remains sharp and perceptive, and maintains an impressive network of black market information brokers.

**SHIELD**

_**Agent Travis**_ – An enigmatic young SHIELD agent who has shown multiple times that he has much to hide, often knowing more about what is going on that SHIELD itself. It was he who made good the Sons of Logan's escape from the Helicarrier.

_**General Cole** _– Now dead, Cole was the strongest military leader SHEILD had at its disposal. It is unlikely the organization will endure without him.

**Mister Sinister and The Nasty Boys**

_**Laura 'X-23' Kinney**_ – Logan's female clone, Laura has grown up into a formidable killing machine in the decades since the X-Men first encountered her. While it was originally assumed that Laura was working for Sinister just for the money, she has made it clear that her true motives are known only to her.

_**Gorgeous George**_ – A gelatinous, shape-shifting mutant, George finds enjoyment only in cruelty, and while he would not lay down his life for Sinister's cause, he would go far to protect the safety of his employer and his plans.

**_Hairbag_ **– With a mind gone almost completely over the edge into ferality, this simple-minded, animalistic mutant will follow the most dominant presence in any situation without question. His lack of imagination or complexity is matched only by his talent for violence.

_**Ramrod** _– Very little is known of this Irish mutant with the ability to bend wooden material to his will. Like his comrades, he is a sociopath, motivated only by the basest needs to inflict pain and seek pleasure.

_**Mister Sinister**_ – An extraordinarily brilliant scientist spanning nearly every field, Sinister was one of the first modern-day mutants to be born. He has learned to extend his life and alter his body and mutant abilities by performing mysterious and dangerous experiments upon himself, using what he knows about virulent science. His tinkering has made him remarkably difficult to kill or even injure, granted him limited telepathic abilities, and raised his strength and endurance to meta-human levels. The full extent of his plans for mutantkind and the planet are known only to himself.

___**The Ark**_ – A massive, self sustaining airship several kilometers in length, unrivaled in scale and technology by any other piece of hardware know to man. Sinister has stolen it and plans on using it as a base of operations and a seat of power as he begins to assert his new mutant empire.

_**Terminus and Ominous**_ – Virus strains created by Mister Sinister, each affecting the reproductive abilities of mutants and humans, respectively. It has been revealed that Ominous is in fact much more widespread than previously anticipated, and has the added horror of reducing those infected with it into mindless, rabid wraiths of human beings.


	2. Prologue

"Hey, Black, are you going to eat that?"

Black stared vacantly at the semi-opaque pile of oat cereal in the small metal bowl. In the cold air of the yard, steam rolled off of what passed as her dinner, despite the fact that it was only marginally warm. If it went long enough without being eaten, it would harden into a solid, impenetrable mound.

She knew she ought to eat it, from a purely physiological standpoint. She hadn't eaten dinner the night before, nor breakfast that morning, and even before that she'd been eating only one or two mouthfuls for days. Her stomach cramped, and waves of nausea washed over her as the acids in her digestive tract roiled and splashed uselessly, searching for something, anything to break down into useful nutrients. She didn't care.

Under the table, where she had sat every morning and evening for the past week, her short, brittle, coal-black fingernails worked themselves into a familiar gap in one of the rivets. The stout bolts were supposed to be welded securely to the underside of the table, but whoever had manufactured the piece had been negligent in the labor, and roughly one in every twenty had been missed. Even then, the rivets were flush to the metal within fractions of a millimeter, forcing her to work at them every day with fingers that blistered and bled from the abuse.

With her free hand, Black pushed the bowl across the table to Jeremiah, who greedily wrapped his claws around it and lowered his head over the lukewarm gruel. His tongue, long and purple and inhumanly articulated, snaked out between his pale, scaly lips and began to scoop up the cereal into his maw. The inhibitor collar around his neck jangled to the bobbing of his head as he chewed and swallowed. When he had first arrived, the collar had fit snugly around the young mutant's neck. Now, he had become thin enough that it hung loose and heavy, a dark ring clearly visible in his reptilian flesh where it had been rubbed raw day and night before finally healing over in a necklace of inflamed scar tissue.

Black absently tugged on her own collar. She was small and skinny enough naturally that the slow course of her emaciation could not be so easily tracked, but she didn't need the collar to know the obvious; She was starving. In the privacy of her cell, when she stripped off her jumpsuit to sleep at night, she could count the ribs poking out from her tar-colored torso. Her breasts, only just beginning to form on her pubescent body when she had first arrived, had disappeared entirely as her metabolism consumed the fat deposits in her body, leaving her looking more like a pre-teen boy than ever before.

The bolt in the underside of the table let out a infinitesimal squeak as her prying finally loosened it. Her eyes widened for half an instant as her heightened state of anxiety allowed her to believe that the whisper of a sound had been loud enough for everyone in the yard to hear, but of course it had not. Invigorated by her progress, she redoubled her efforts, pushing her broken thumbnail under the lip of the rivet and working it until it began to twist freely between her fingers. She could feel the tips of her digits begin to bleed, but she did not show pain on her face, nor did she worry about hiding the small wounds from the guards; Her black blood didn't show up on her similarly-hued skin.

Jeremiah finished eating her ration and pushed the bowl back towards her.

"Thanks," he smiled, his thin, purple tongue flicking out between his lips. Without another word, he stood up from the steel bench and walked away, pulling up the collar of his orange coveralls to shield himself from the bite of cold in the air, though she knew as well as he did that it wouldn't help. The standard issue prison-style clothing was next to useless at warding off a chill.

"Prick," Black muttered. Her mastery of english was not complete, but she had learned more than her share of curses since coming to the internment camp. The boy was still in denial, thinking that if he could beg and pilfer and make nice and finish other people's meals, that there was some chance he might escape with his health at least partially intact. Nobody escaped.

Judging by their interaction, and the way Black let him take her food, an outsider might guess that she and the reptilian boy were friends. They would be wrong. She had taken a dislike to the mutant almost immediately. He had the skulk and swagger of an opportunist, and while she was certain she was not the only one who saw it, she had a particular distaste for his ilk. He was two-faced and sly, and while she could sympathize with his desire to be seen under favorable light by the larger inmates and the guards alike, she could not abide by it. He would throw her or anyone else under a bus the first chance he got if it meant a pat on the head from the interment camp's administrators.

No, Jeremiah was not her friend. She had no friends in the yard, or the majority of the camp if she did not count Behemoth. Normally, she would not have even allowed Jeremiah to linger in her presence, but the pitiful meal sitting in front of her had been too tempting, and she needed to rid herself of it. Simply throwing it out or refusing it from the food cart was not an option. Wasting rations was an offense that the guards rarely tolerated, usually expressing their consternation with their long, flexible metal canes that were part whip, and part club. Much as her body screamed at her in protest, she would not eat.

With a final squeak of metal against metal, the rivet popped free of its housing and fell into her palm under the table. Despite her hand being mostly out of sight, she pressed the small chunk of steel behind her thumb, effectively hiding it from a casual glance. She would not have needed to worry if she had the full use of her mutant powers, which would have allowed her to sap the color out of the piece of hardware until it was so black that it blended with her skin, but the inhibitor collar made that impossible.

Another hot, curdling wave of nausea crept into her stomach, crawled up her throat, and met her tongue in the form of a watery, anemic bile that she had to force back down with all of the effort that she could muster. Standing from the table, she could feel her joints, sharp and bony, the muscles thin and stringy, shaking from even that small task. She moved slowly, deliberately, wasting as little energy as possible.

A bell rang in the far corner of the yard, marking the end of meal time for her group. In near perfect unison, every pair of eyes, mutant or human, drifted towards the steel double doors as the metal bars that held them secure slid back into recesses in the wall.

_Just in time._

Steeling herself, Black cupped the small rivet in her hand and, feinting a yawn, tossed it into her mouth. It had a harsh, sour, dirty taste that she had become accustomed to. Orienting the object carefully with her tongue, she tilted her head and let it fall to the back of her throat. The maneuver came to her with an ease of something practiced many times, which it was.

It was not so much a matter of trying to swallow. She had made that mistake in her first attempts. Instead, she concentrated on opening her esophagus as much as possible, overcoming her reflex action that would have forced her to gag, and letting the weight of the object work its way further and further down. Really, the hardest part was holding her breath long enough for the rivet to pass the point in her throat where her air passage was no longer blocked.

Finally, it was done, and she felt the chunk of metal plop into her stomach, the weight noticeable in her rail-thin body. For a moment, her digestive system was fooled by the object, mistaking it for food, and she felt her intestines churn, starting the futile process of trying to break down the piece of hardware, but before long her empty, hollow nausea returned.

The mutants in the yard began to move towards the gate, barely a whisper of life between any of them as beings as colorful and varied as one could possibly imagine proceeded with an identical dead-eyed shuffle, inhibitor collars jingling, the small indicator lights glowing. One man, whom Black had come to know simply as Marcus, stood at least three feet higher than all the others, with a face more closely resembling a hammerhead shark than a human. Even still, he could not have looked more pacified, or more defeated. The large mutant, who could have taken strides yards long, practically tiptoed at the same pace as those surrounding him, his eyes never leaving his feet. Black picked up her bowl and joined the group.

They began to coalesce into something resembling a queue as guards emerged from the open gate. A pair leveled heavy repulsor rifles at the crowd that hummed and crackled as the men charged the weapons. A third guard carried what looked like a large pistol, but was as far from a weapon as could be. He approached the mutant closest to him, an unassuming woman with a tangle of blonde, greasy hair knotted on top of her head, and leveled the hand-held device at her throat. A faint, green light pulsed from the muzzle of the pistol, capturing in its ray the woman's inhibitor collar. The device pinged gently, and the guard read the information it relayed to his personal heads up display. It also functioned as a scanner of sorts, and would beep loudly if any sizable, inorganic mass that was not the collar was detected. Hence Black's need to swallow the rivet.

"Name," the guard with the scanner said. It was not a request, but a demand.

The woman mumbled something so quiet that Black could not hear. It did not matter. None of their names mattered to anyone except the man with the device in his hand. Even then, he only used their names as a rather rudimentary checkpoint to be certain that no two mutants had discovered a way to trade collars. Black was very sure that such a thing had never happened, given the simplistic nature of the failsafe, but she imagined it was in place purely to let mutants know that they had thought of that too. Satisfied, the man next inspected to woman's bowl, motioned for her to deposit it in a bin near the gate, and waved the next mutant forward.

As the mutants pressed in, and bodies taller than her own moved forward, Black's view became obscured by a wall of orange, dirty jumpsuits that shifted back and forth slowly as though their owner's feet had been manacled together. Minutes passed, and she could make no accurate determination of how close she actually was to the end of the queue. Finally, the herd thinned in front of her and it was her turn.

At thirteen, Black was not the youngest of the mutants in the interment camp, but she was of a very small and special group of individuals that had been among the last on the planet to be born before every human and mutant on the planet who had the X-gene had been totally sterilized by the Terminus virus. Ninety percent of the time, this fact was not made much of, but during the checkpoints, when every mutant was made to step forward in the view of the others, a general hush fell over the crowd. Black knew what they were looking at: Living, breathing proof of the demise of mutantkind. In a world where mutant babies no longer existed, she was simultaneously revered and shunned, a constant reminder of the species' impending extinction. She would have been very surprised to find a single mutant on the planet younger than five years old.

"Name," the guard said, his instrument washing her face and neck in green light. Black felt her collar vibrate lightly in response and the identifying pistol chimed.

Perhaps it was because she had not eaten in over a day, and even before then, her diet had consisted mainly of unidentifiable piles of colorless slop, but for a moment, the question resonated dully inside of Black's skull, and, confoundingly, no corresponding answer presented itself.

_What is my name?_

She knew that 'Black' was the wrong answer. 'Black' was the name her fellow inmates had given her, after her nearly unbreakable silence had forced them to bestow their own moniker upon her. Even with the collar, her skin, eyes, hair, teeth, and mouth were all the same flat, colorless shade that appeared to the human eye as black. In reality, her flesh emitted no color wavelength at all, but she was certainly not going to take the time to explain that to anyone here.

"Name," the guard said again, with an urgent anger in his voice. With his free hand, he loosened the cane that hung at his hip.

Black bit her lip as she tried hard to think, but the pertinent information would simply not be jarred loose. It was not the first time her memory had started to fizzle since she had begun her voluntary hunger strike, but forgetting her name, even temporarily? She knew that was bad. She had known it at breakfast, but that seemed such an impossibly long time ago.

The answer came suddenly, and in a form Black had not expected. It was a memory. A horrible memory. Perhaps the worst that Black had acquired thus far in her short life.

The space beneath her small bed, unlike many children her age, had been Black's refuge. It was the place where the shadows were the most dense and unyielding in her small bedroom. When she curled her skinny frame into the tiny gap, her black skin sucked in what little remaining light there was, rendering the immediate area impossibly cloaked in a thick, unnatural darkness. Whenever she'd had a nightmare, under the bed was the first place her mother had looked, reaching in until Black grasped her mother's smooth, pale hand with her small, black digits.

That night though, what had driven her from beneath her covers was a nightmare of an entirely different variety.

Despite her youth, Black had possessed a keen understanding of the world's hostile attitude towards mutants, mostly due to her parents. They had been immigrants from Russia, and a sharp disdain for overwrought governmental authority had been passed down to them, distilled through the retelling of their relatives, from the days of the Iron Curtain and the former brutal regime of the Soviet Union. When their daughter's white skin and blonde hair had begun to transform to the shade of freshly-lain blacktop before she was more than a decade old, they had jumped into the fray of human-mutant tension with a grim enthusiasm.

Things had already been bad when Black had been born, but before her mutation had manifested itself, the ongoing war on mutantkind was little more than background noise in a life that had mainly consisted of pre-school and children's books and her mother and father's kind smiles and warm, loving embraces. After, her family had become wrapped up in news broadcasts and unofficial reports circulating the news nets of mutants imprisoned in unknown locations, of robotic mutant-hunting machines, of terrorist attacks in all corners of the globe.

At first, Black's parents had defiantly insisted that she go about her young life as though nothing had changed. She attended public school to the tune of dirty looks and outright threats from other students, and occasionally the teachers themselves. It was not until a black cat, gutted and beheaded, had been left on their doorstep that Black's mother had decided to withdraw her and see about her education from home.

Black did not remember the first time her parents had left the house at night to participate in marches and protests organized to express the opinion of the tiny minority of the public that were still sympathetic to the pro-mutant cause, but she knew now that it had probably been the factor that had, in the end, led to their death and her own incarceration. Her parents had refused to register their daughter with the office of mutant affairs in accordance with the mutant registration act. It was now common knowledge that law enforcement agencies had used the protests and marches as a means of generating lists of potential mutants in hiding or humans who harbored mutants illegally. It had only been a matter of time before Black's parents had fallen under their attention.

Things would have been easier if Black had been gifted with a mutant power that could be discreet, could be easily hidden. When the agents from the office of mutant affairs had woken the household from sleep with loud, insistent rapping on their front door, her father might have simply allowed them inside. "No sir, no mutants here. Just my wife and I and our lovely normal human daughter." As it was, he had known that the moment they saw Black, she would be tagged and carted off 'for her own safety.'

In the official report, the agents would state that Black's father had answered the door with a pistol in hand, which he had attempted to use to drive the agents off. There were many things that Black could not recall about her earliest years with perfect clarity, but one thing she knew for certain was that her father did not own a pistol. The report would also state that Black's mother had attempted to barricade herself in Black's room. In truth, she had never even made it that far.

The gunshots had driven Black, terrified and sobbing, under her bed, into her private refuge where she had hidden from her darkest dreams. It was from that darkness that she could make out her mother's feet as they shakily made their way into her room. As soon as she had passed the threshold, she had collapsed to the floor, her eyes staring intently at the dark place under the small bed where she knew her daughter would be. Black had seen the red spot in her mother's stomach as it grew, soaking into the fabric of her nightgown, growing shiny as it saturated the material and began to pool on the floor.

Her mother gasped once, twice, and reached a blood-stained hand toward her. She could not speak, but as the life began to leave her eyes, her mouth contorted and formed one word.

"Vascha," Black muttered, shuddering slightly as the memory faded, "Vascha Aleksandrov."

The guard nodded and gazed slightly upward at numbers and figures that were being projected via computer onto the visor of his helmet.

"Your collar reads that you're still losing weight, Aleksandrov," he observed, "You eating?"

Black lifted her empty bowl for him to inspect.

"I'm increasing your caloric intake," he said, "But if I find out you've been trading your rations, I'll tan your black hide."

Black shrugged vaguely. She knew better than to take this as a sign of compassion. Technically, mutants were not allowed to die in internment camps. Officially, these camps, scattered through all fifty states, were rehabilitation and research centers, where the government promised the mutants were kept in seclusion merely for the safety of the public, and would be released as soon as a more permanent means of power inhibition was discovered. It was a lie of course, and mutants died on a regular basis, though it was true that guards did exercise restraint in the case of mutants who had powers deemed scientifically valuable. But the memory of prison camps filled with innocent Japanese immigrants and citizens was still too fresh in the mind of the American public to tolerate anything less, even if it was only the thinnest of veils over an ugly truth. When mutant corpses were carted away in black bags, it was due to 'old age' or 'accidental overdoses of prescription drugs' or 'escape attempts,' never random, brutal beatings, starvation, torture, or suicide.

Black tossed the bowl into the bin with the others and began to proceed through the corridor leading to the cell block, the cold of the concrete piercing her bare feet like hundreds of tiny knives.

"You guys should really do some maintenance on those tables. Things are falling apart around here."

Black recognized the voice, but did not turn around, and did not break stride. That would have attracted attention, which was exactly why Jeremiah had said it. How he knew about the bolt she had stolen, she could not guess. It must have been some mutant ability that was not affected by his collar. His hearing or sight, maybe, or some other aspect of his mutant physiology that could not be switched off by the device around his neck. All that mattered was that she did not react to his words.

She knew why he did it. It was the same reason he stalked about the yard, trying to swoop in on leftovers going uneaten. He was trying to curry favor with the guards because he believed there was still a chance he might leave the camp someday, while at the same time masking his accusation well enough that no inmate within earshot would ever suppose that Jeremiah was betraying a fellow mutant.

Black wanted to turn around, run back, and pummel the reptilian mutant within an inch of his life. Even in her mind's eye she could see his greedy, self-centered smirk. She had never liked him in the year or so since he had arrived, but he had become less subtle in his attempts to get on the good side of his captors. But she fought the rage down, allowing her nausea to return in its place. She did some calculations in her head. If the guards did indeed make a guess as to Jeremiah's hidden meaning within his words, they would still wait until the yard was totally empty to check the tables. Even then, it would take them at least a few minutes to discover the absent bolts, if they found them missing at all. Then they would review surveillance footage for the past several days, looking for any mutants that had occupied that specific seat at the table with anything resembling regularity. It was only then that they would come for her. She had at least a couple hours.

She hadn't thought to execute her plan so soon, but the half-inch bolt she carried in her stomach was the last she would need. It was time.

The main causeway of the cell block was not like the vids she had seen on her parents' television that had documented and showcased human prisons. It was not a boisterous, loud place, buzzing with life and chatter of swaggering, cocky inmates. The five stories of identical, repeating gray metal doors were dead quiet. Nothing moved, as though the structure was composed of stacked caskets rather than prison cells. Black made her way to a set of stairs and climbed to the second floor, turned right, and proceeded to her own cell. She ignored the half dozen guards she passed on her way, and they her. She barely stood higher than their belts, was as black and skinny as the iron railings that lined the catwalks, and warranted very little of their attention.

Most mutants in the camp considered it particularly unlucky to be housed on the second floor, and at first, Black had agreed. On the far end of the block, indeed, immediately adjacent to her own cell, were a dozen larger cells, with doors that were huge and heavy and rarely opened, if they opened at all. There were kept the powerhouses, the Omegas, or whatever word you chose for particularly strong, particularly dangerous mutants whose impressive abilities were only handicapped by inhibitor fields, not completely turned off. At all hours, these 'special' occupants of the camp could be heard screeching, clawing, and pounding on the walls of their metal boxes. More than once, Black had awoken to the sensation of concrete chips raining down from her ceiling as some Omega raged within his or her cell with such ferocity that the very foundation of the building shuddered. It was not known exactly what was done with the Omegas, but every so often, one of them would leave their cell and never come back. It was rumored that they were being cryogenically frozen and placed in some kind of storage.

Black's own door was directly beside one such Omega's cell, as it happened. And while for the first few months of her incarceration, she had fallen asleep to the sound of massive wails, grunts, and screams, now she was glad to see the heavy, unyielding door that contained the mutant who had become her only friend in this place. She considered it nothing short of genuine good fortune that she shared a wall with the giant man who terrified the guards. On the door itself, stenciled characters had been hastily applied to spell out a series of numbers and letters, forming 'Behemoth – 435222.'

Behemoth had a real name, of course. Or at least he used to. The fact was that most of the Omegas were only referred to by nicknames or their assigned numbers. It made them easier to remember in the event of an emergency. And easier to dehumanize in the eyes of the guards.

Black entered her own cell and heard the chime of the motion detector, which slid the door shut behind her and illuminated the small space that was her prison and her home. She felt sympathetic to mutants larger than herself if this room was the standard size throughout the camp. It was just wide enough that she could touch both walls with her palms resting flat against their surface, and when she lay on her barely cushioned metal slab that passed as a cot, there was not much space left between her feet and the door itself. A larger person would have to curl up their legs just to lay down.

Immediately, Black made her way to the small sink and toilet combination unit affixed to the floor at the far end of her cell and leaned her face over the metal basin. When she had first begun to plan this, she had trained herself to vomit on command by pressing her fingers down the back of her tongue until she retched. Now, she needed only tense of specific set of muscles in her throat and abdomen, and the contents of her stomach came rushing up. Of course, the only thing that her stomach contained was a small chunk of dull steel. It hurt coming up, but not nearly so bad, she thought, as the first one had been. She caught the bolt before it could clatter loudly against the sink, and turned on the tap, running it under the room-temperature water until the pale yellow slime from her stomach was washed down the drain.

Black wiped her mouth and went to her bed. Reaching into a small hole in the foam pad that served as a mattress, she produced two more bolts of identical size and shape. It was not a particularly clever or ingenious hiding spot, and even the most cursory of searches would reveal her secret stash, but cell tosses within the large camp were only done once every two weeks in rotation, and it had only been twelve days since she had begun collecting.

Next, she began producing items from her better, more permanent hiding places. Wrapped tightly in a coil near the very bottom of the leg of her cot, a length of thin, black wire, so fine it could barely be seen. From the underside of her toilet seat, a dozen sheets of white paper, cut into squares the size of a book of matches. Lastly, she pried a tiny, black nub of pencil graphite from where she had worked it painfully beneath the nail of her big toe.

A low chime sounded throughout the cell block, and the lights dimmed to a level reminiscent of dusk, if they had ever been allowed outside to see the day ending over the horizon. It was the signal that lights out would begin soon. As it was, Black had not seen a sunrise or a sunset since she had been brought to the camp. How long had it been? Three, maybe four years?

Black settled on the floor, her back leaning against the wall she shared with Behemoth, and pounded lightly on the concrete with her small fist four times. At once, she felt woozy from even that minimal effort, her hunger biting hard in her abdomen, above the navel. With her depleted strength, she was not sure that the giant of a mutant next door could hear, but a few moments later, she felt the low, measured beat of the man rapping his own wall with a fist the size of a watermelon.

In truth, Black had never seen Behemoth's face. She did not even know his real name. In her years spent as his neighbor in her cell, he had only been released half a dozen times, and then all she'd seen through the tiny window in her door was a massive, gray shadow that moved laboriously, each step causing her own floor to tremble under the weight. She only knew just how big his hands were because of a dent Behemoth had made in the metal floor of the walkway nearly two years ago when he'd lost his temper and crushed a guard beneath his fist. For that transgression, Behemoth had been tortured for days, but not killed. Omega mutants were considered the most valuable to human scientists, or so Black was told.

Initially, Behemoth had frightened her. When she had first beheld the massive door that sat next to her own on the day she'd first arrived, her heart had leapt into her throat. In those days, he took every opportunity to batter the interior of his cell, screaming at the top of his lungs like an animal possessed, throwing himself against the door whenever a guard walked by his tiny window. It had taken a year for Black to work up the courage to ask him to stop. It hadn't been easy acquiring the paper, the wire, or the pencil graphite, but when she had finally amassed her materials, she had sent her first message to the monster of a man.

If her arms had been thicker, and if her limbs did not blend so well with the darkness, even with the majority of her powers deactivated, it would not have worked. As it was, when the lights went out, she had attached a slip of paper to the wire, worked her small hand and forearm out of the slit in her door that passed as a window, and began to spin the short length of wire like a lasso between her fingers. In those days, it had taken the majority of the night before she finally managed to arc the slip of paper on the end of her line into Behemoth's window. When she'd finally done it, her heart stood still for what seemed like minutes as she waited for the Omega mutant to respond.

The note had read: _"Hello. My name is Black. I'm the girl who lives next to you. I can't sleep when you're so loud."_ It was almost comically simplistic, but back then Black had been limited both by writing space and a slightly stunted English vocabulary. She had never intended to recruit him into the sort of plot she had hatched now. She had simply wanted to sleep through an entire night.

When she had finally felt a gentle tug on the wire, she drew it back into her cell and settled on her cot, looking at the small piece of paper that had become heavily creased in the hands of the huge mutant. She had not known what to expect in reply; Behemoth had no writing utensil of his own. The answer came soon enough though. A series of measured thumps resonated through her wall. They continued until Black finally pounded her own tiny fist against the concrete and then held her ear to it. What came next startled her.

"_Sooorrrr-yyyyyyyy..._" the voice was so deep that it was less of a sound and more of a rattling in her bones.

From that night on, Behemoth had been quiet as a mouse at night. Though they never saw each other, they had become friends over the years, or as close to friends as they could be without ever being able to have a decent conversation. There were nights when Black would spend hours writing notes in painfully small text on her tiny scraps of paper, and though she was certain that Behemoth read every one of them, his answers could only come in the form of thumps on her wall, or simple, one or two word answers. From what she could tell, with his mutant super-strength sapped by his collar, but his body still at massive, inhuman proportions, Behemoth's heart and lungs struggled to meet the needs of his musculature, making uttering more than a few words an exhaustive task.

Upon feeling his reply against her wall, Black gathered up her first scrap of paper and scrawled one word on its surface with the small chunk of graphite: _Tonight._

She had gone over her plan with him at length several times, so there was no doubt that he would know what she was talking about, but there was still the question of whether or not he would cooperate. Thinking on this, Black added "_Now or never_" onto the note. It was true enough. If Behemoth didn't help her, her contraband would almost certainly be discovered in less than an hour or so, and she would likely be moved. And being situated next to Behemoth was the only thing that made her plot work.

There was another chime, and the lights died completely, leaving the entire block in darkness, which did not at all affect Black's ability to see; One of the perks of her mutation that endured even with the collar. She stood, attaching the slip of paper to the wire with deft hands, and pushed her arm out of the small window. She twirled it once, twice, and let the note sail in an arc, slipping into Behemoth's window on the first attempt.

He tugged once on the wire to let her know he'd read it, but just as quickly rapped on the concrete wall they shared. Black put her ear to the surface.

"_Nnnnooooo..._" came his massive, exhausted-sounding voice that seemed to creep through the wall and into her ear, "_Nnnnooooo waaayyy ooouuut..._"

Black sighed, but she had been prepared for this. Behemoth saw himself as something of a protector to her, despite never actually being allowed in her presence. He had never liked her plan, and told her as much, but she was not certain that he would not attempt the same thing if he could.

Black wrote another note. "_Please,_" it said, "_I don't want to die in this cell_." It was not an exaggeration. Behemoth knew about her hunger strike, and knew her well enough to expect that she would continue it whether he helped or not. It was the basest form of manipulation, but the urgency of her plan sidestepped anything more subtle. She attached the note to the wire and fished it into his window.

There was no reply this time, and Black took that as an affirmative response. She set to her work. Making three loops in the wire, she securely fastened the three bolts to the length in a cluster at one end, pulling it as tight as she could. She held the knot of metal in front of her, and tentatively swung it back and forth on the wire. It _looked_ like it would hold.

Pushing arm out of the metal slit in her door once again, she began to carefully unspool the wire with the bolts knotted at the end. She was especially careful not to let the small hunks of metal graze against the other side of her door as they swayed back and forth. The cell block was almost totally quiet tonight, and the slightest noise would be noticed.

Holding her breath, Black swung of wire.

After years of expertly fishing notes through Behemoth's window, she had expected to be able to get the bolts through in one try. The weight of the pieces of metal, it seemed, had been too radically different from slip of paper, and her eyes widened as her package missed its mark by a full four inches and clanged loudly against Behemoth's door.

Black felt her face flush, felt her whole body go rigid. If any guard had heard the noise, she would know it in less than ten seconds. Nevertheless, almost a full minute of silence had passed before she finally allowed herself to exhale. Calming her nerves, she began swinging the bundle of wire and bolts once again. This time, the package arced perfectly, slipping into Behemoth's window slit at the very apex of the swing, falling into his cell with little more than a whisper. Black sighed in a gush of relief.

Now all she had to do was wait.

When it came to the dense, padded, electromagnetically-reinforced steel walls of his cell, Behemoth's sapped strength could not persevere. Each Omega cell had been specifically designed with their inhabitants in mind, with properties and failsafes that could counteract seemingly any combination of mutant gifts, from telepaths to teleporters. With the small rivets that Black had given him, however, Behemoth had more than enough strength to bend and twist the metal in his hands.

There was a light tug on her end of the wire, and she slowly began pulling the line in, careful not to let the mass on the end scrape her door as she did.

Even knowing full well what would be on the other end of the line, she was still impressed. From the three small rivets, Behemoth had squeezed and pressed and shaped them into one singular piece of steel. In this case, a blade. It was not a proper knife, really. When she fit it into her fist, there was only about two inches of actual cutting surface that protruded between her thumb and forefinger, but that was okay. She had planned on the weapon being small. The edge itself was better than she could have hoped. She ran her finger along it to test its sharpness, and knew that if she pressed any harder, it would slice her flesh open. She was not at all familiar with bladed weapons, but it seemed like this one would serve her purposes.

There was a tremor in her wall, and Black pressed her ear to the concrete to listen. At first, what she heard did not make much sense. It was like the rhythmic pounding that Behemoth usually made with his fist, but this was steadier, quieter, and sounded vaguely distant. It took another minute for Black to understand what it was; The giant Omega mutant was weeping.

Black frowned and put her small palm against the wall. While they could not hold actual conversations, they had worked out a system for the rudimentary communication. One knock for 'yes,' two for 'no,' three for 'thank you,' four for hello and goodbye and so on. She balled her fist and beat the wall three times.

"Thanks, B," she whispered, knowing full well that her tiny voice would not carry through the wall the way his did.

In response, Behemoth rapped on his wall four times, apparently too exhausted from his sobbing to speak.

Black frowned and felt a lump in her throat that seemed to tighten painfully with every second. If she could have ended the big mutant's suffering as well, she would have. As it was, she was only marginally certain of her plan working, and she knew that Behemoth understood as well as anyone that, when offered an opportunity to escape from the camp, you took it.

Of course, she could have simply slit her wrists with her new blade, or continue starving herself until her heart gave out, but that was not enough. Infuriatingly, the camp's medical teams were truly gifted at saving the lives of attempted suicide victims, keeping from the more desperate inmates the freedom of a permanent oblivion. Of the dozens of suicides that had been attempted on her block alone, only one or two had been successful. If she wanted to check out of the interment camp for good, she would have to give them a reason to let her die. The most obvious way to do that was to take a few of them with her. The memory of her mother's face as she bled out onto the carpet of her bedroom wouldn't allow for anything less. She was not foolish enough to think that she could take on any of the guards, but their armor and their canes, but they were not her target.

Moving quickly now, Black cut the end of a sleeve from her orange jumpsuit and wrapped the sharp blade of the newly-fashioned shiv up in the material. Satisfied that it could not easily cut through the layers of cloth, she unzipped her coveralls and shoved the makeshift knife down the front of her white, prison-issue underwear. Zipping herself back up, she took a moment to shift back and forth, making sure that she did not feel the bite of metal anywhere in the skin of her thighs and groin.

She gathered up her sheets of paper, her wire, and the nub of graphite and put them in the toilet and flushed, watching them disappear in a swirl of water. Then she turned on the tap of her sink and, taking a deep breath, put her mouth completely over the spigot and began to drink.

With almost no food in the past week, and none at all in the past two days, her body was dangerously low on electrolytes and nutrients. She was not intimately familiar with the concept of water intoxication, but her father had warned her of it ever since she had been a child. In her youth, Black had tended to lose fluids quickly through sweating whenever she played sports with her peers, and she had made a habit of guzzling water to compensate. It was her father who had started insisting that she eat large amounts of oranges during her athletics, or consume sugary sports drinks, rather than relying solely on water for rehydration. Too much water and no enough electrolytes, he said, would lead to overhydration.

It was no easy task to rouse the medical teams that the internment camp employed after lights out. Cries for help or threats of suicide were almost always ignored, because the inhibitor collars had another purpose; In addition to suppressing mutant powers, they also acted as constant monitoring devices that kept track of each mutant's pulse and breathing patterns. Simply knocking herself out would not do the trick. She had to come as close to killing herself as she could, had to be a medically serious as possible, while still being easily resuscitated.

That was the plan, anyway.

After only two minutes of chugging the lukewarm water, her stomach began to ache, this time from being over-full rather than being painfully empty. Still, she pressed on, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of liquid until she could feel her stomach bulge beneath her ribs.

After five minutes, and a growing pain and soreness in her stomach and the surrounding muscles, a bolt of lightening seemed to crack her skull in half, and for a moment she began to vomit up what was probably close to a gallon of water. She contracted to muscles in her throat and abdomen and forced herself to hold in the liquid. Her head and neck and shoulders ached, her right hand began to shake, and her vision became hazy, as though a fog had fallen over her tiny cell. Black put her face under the faucet and continued to drink.

She knew she was playing a dangerous game. Despite its normally benign nature, water could be as harmful as any other solution when consumed in too high a dose in too short a time. If the medical teams could not read the signs and diagnose her quickly, there was a very real chance that she would slip into a coma and die. Not that it would be a bad thing, or even contrary to what she wanted. Black had had quite enough of the whole thing. Still, there was a place in her brain that still insisted on some attempt at vengeance, as small and insignificant a gesture as it might be. Someone, _anyone_, had to pay.

After seven minutes, she lost all control over her ability to swallow any more water. Sputtering, she fell to the floor on her back, her stomach bloated with more liquid than it could bear. Finally, all the muscular control in the world could not stop her body from doing what was required, and a veritable fountain of water came rocketing out of her throat, going up her nose, down her windpipe, in her eyes, choking her, blinding her. Every muscle ached, her legs spasmed and twitched erratically, and her entire body felt as though it had been dipped in battery acid.

Black was vaguely aware of an alarm somewhere as her consciousness began to fade, and it was only after several seconds that she realized that it was coming from the collar around her neck.

_I hope they don't handcuff me to the gurney_, she thought idly, _I'll be screwed if they do._

* * *

The first thing Black did as her brain crawled its way back from the murky haze of unconsciousness was flex and move her wrists from side to side. She let out a sigh of relief to find them unshackled.

_Well, that's one thing that's gone according to plan._

Around her she took in the sights, smells, and sounds of an infirmary. There was the steady beeping of what she could only assume was her own heartbeat, the heavy scent of disinfectants and chemical cleansing agents. What little she could see was obscured by the throbbing in her skull that clouded her vision.

A bright light passed back and forth over her dark, pupil-less eyes, and Black winced them closed. She tried to say something in protest, but found her mouth covered by an oxygen mask. She had an urge to bat the light away, but stopped herself. Her hands were unbound for now, but she was certain that the guards who were surely watching over her would take any excuse to rectify that, even if she was little more than a child.

_Stay focused,_ she reminded herself, _Make sure they didn't find the shiv._

"I think she's coming around," Black heard a woman's voice observe, what seemed like a very long distance away.

She tilted her head slightly and looked down at her prone form. She was still wearing her coveralls. They hand been unfastened to her waist and opened to expose her stomach and breastbone, but they had not been removed, which stood to reason that they had not searched her very thoroughly. Again, her young age and diminutive size was working to her advantage. The guards had probably nearly had a heart attack when word came that a mutant from the second floor of B-block was being admitted to the infirmary, only to breathe a sigh of relief when they learned that it was a small, non-Omega level mutant who was not yet old enough to call herself a woman.

She felt a hand on her cheek, disarmingly reassuring and kind, with fingers that gently stroked her flesh.

"It's okay, sweetie. Can you tell me your name? Do you know where you are?"

Black pushed her head to one side. She meant to shrug off the hand on her face, but her muscles did not respond quickly enough, and whoever's hand it was took her movements as encouragement, and only stroked her cheek all the more. It was infuriating.

"I have some questions for her if you're finished," another voice said, this one male, stern, and authoritative.

"I still have some tests to run," the first voice said, "If you'll just give us another half hour or so."

Black heard the second voice, a guard she had guessed, mutter something unintelligible. She tried to use the opportunity to move her hand, intending to subtly check if her weapon was still nestled between her thighs. Her body was still too weak and senseless for her to tell otherwise. Again, her movements were misinterpreted, and she felt a hand grip hers, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

"Are you awake, young lady? Can you hear me?"

Her vision was finally clearing enough that she could see more than shapeless blur in front of her, and the owner of the voice finally had a face, hovering just inches above Black's head. She was middle-aged, with shoulder-length, mousy brown hair gathered in a loose ponytail and the base of her neck. She had a face that was both kind and weathered, as though a career in caring for dangerous mutants had caused her to age more quickly than her genetics had originally dictated. Her identification that she wore pinned to her shirt names her as a Doctor Susan Bailey.

_I'll never get to the shiv if she keeps fawning over me._

"Water," she said, perhaps with a touch more fragility than she actually felt.

Doctor Bailey frowned and touched the top of Black's head again. "I'm sorry dear, you managed to give yourself water poisoning. I can't give you any liquids for at least another couple of hours. We had to pump your stomach. You're lucky to be alive."

_So much for that._

Maybe the answer was not getting her away, but getting her closer.

Black lifted her head and, with clearing vision, managed her first real assessment of the room she occupied. It was larger than she had expected, but maybe that was simply because she had spent the last few years living inside rooms that were criminally small. Every surface from the floor to the ceiling to the machines that whirred and hummed around her seemed to be made of some kind of dull, white plastic, and were spotlessly clean. In two corners, guards stood at relaxed attention. She guessed which had been the one to speak to Doctor Bailey moments ago by the impatient look he wore on his face. They were each about ten paces away.

"Sweetheart?" Doctor Bailey asked, "Do you remember what you were doing in your cell?"

It had been a long time since Black had needed to fake tears. It was a skill she had learned when she first arrived at the internment camp to find herself protection under more righteous, parentally-minded inmates from the guards and the mutant bullies in her block. It came back to her easily enough, and she felt her neck and face muscles tense into a pained grimace. Tears welled up and began streaming down her cheeks, and she let out a shuddering, stuttered breath.

"Oh, honey," Doctor Bailey cooed, and moved to embrace Black's prone form.

"I'd stay back if I were you, Doctor," the stern-faced guard admonished.

Doctor Bailey made a sweeping gesture with her hand as though to shoo the guard away and wrapped Black up in her arms. Black was small enough that, in the Doctor's embrace, her white lab coat draping over her, she was effectively hidden from the view of the men.

"She's just a girl," Doctor Bailey scolded, "And she has her collar on. I swear, you could all learn a few lessons in compassion."

Black fished one hand down the front of her coveralls, into the elastic band of her underwear. There was the shiv, just as she'd left it. She pulled the cloth covering from the blade and palmed the small tool in her fist. Holding the shiv concealed in one hand, she reached up and returned the Doctor's embrace, still forcing manufactured sobs out of her throat.

"It's alright, sweetie," Doctor Bailey whispered, "You're okay."

"Doctor," the stern-faced guard said, "Step away from her."

"I told you to back off and let me work!"

"Doctor, she has something in her hand! Step back!"

_Now or never._

Black sprung, using every last reserve of strength to leap off of the examination table. Tubes and wires and medical tape tore away from her body as she bounded over Doctor Bailey, wrapping her legs around the woman's waist and both arms around her neck, pressing the blade to the flesh over her throat.

"Back!" Black shouted, her voice thick with sedatives and her native Russian accent, "Get back! Get away from me!"

She had never been trained in taking a hostage beyond what she had seen in vids, and she very nearly dropped the knife in her shaking hand. She tightened her grip on the hunk of sharpened metal and gritted her teeth.

The two guards had drawn their repulsor pistols and had taken a few steps forward, but she could see the hesitation in their eyes. Black was nearly completely hidden behind Doctor Bailey's body. The Doctor herself had stiffened, apparently gobsmacked by the sudden shift in the situation. She held her arms out to her sides, not moving, like someone who had suddenly found themselves face to face with a wild animal in the forest.

Black pressed the blade down harder and Doctor Bailey shuddered, whimpering as her bottom lip began to shake. She knew she ought to cut the woman's throat right then and there. That was the plan, wasn't it? But something stopped her. The guards exchanged glances, and each took one full step backward, but did not lower their pistols. After a long pause, one of the men, the one who had spoken earlier, and was apparently the more senior of the two, finally sighed and holstered his weapon. The other guard did not follow suit, but did lower the sights of his pistol by a few inches until he was pointing at the floor, still tense and prepared to fire.

_Shoot me, damn you._

"So that's what you used the rivets for," the first guard said, "Clever."

"Get her off!" Doctor Bailey pleaded, "She's going to kill me!"

The guard pursed his lips contemplatively. "No, I don't think she is."

In response, Black let out a guttural sound that was supposed to be a growl, but sounded more like a hissing cat. Her hands were shaking badly, and her teeth had begun to chatter.

_Why can't I just _do_ it?_

"If she was going to kill you, she would have done it already," the guard said, taking a step forward, "That was the plan, wasn't it? You're not trying to escape. You're trying to get us to shoot you. The problem is that you're scared."

He took another step forward.

"I've met killers in this place, girl. You're not a killer. You're just a kid," he continued, "You're not going to kill that woman any more than I'm going to kill you. So how about you put the shiv down and we forget about this whole unpleasant episode? No harm, no foul?"

It was a lie, and a bad one at that. There was no way Black was avoiding a rigorous bout of torture disguised as medical research for her transgression. The only conceivable way out was death. It was the only course of action that made sense to her anymore. Nevertheless, her weak, shaking fingers, almost numb with exhaustion, loosened their grip on the blade. A part of her knew that the man must be right. She wasn't a killer after all, and the idea of dying _did_ scare her, more than she would have imagined.

_I don't want to die._

The realization shocked her, and she felt her eyes begin with swell and sting with real tears. She was just a small, scared little girl again, and it simultaneously disgusted and relieved her.

Black let the shiv fall, watching it clatter dully on the spotless white floor.

Faster than she could react, the guard leapt forward, pulled her hands away from Doctor Bailey's throat, and twisted her body, throwing her painfully to the ground. Black barely registered the impact as her cheek smacked into the floor with a sharp slapping noise. She felt his full weight on her small frame as he bent her arms behind her back.

_Weak. You were too weak. Too weak to save yourself._

"Next time I tell you to do something, you fucking do it!" the guard was shouting at Doctor Bailey as he wrenched Black's shoulders painfully. Then turning to his comrade he said, "Give me those restraints."

_That was the closest you'll ever come to freedom. And you blew it. You couldn't even kill a human. They didn't share your hesitation when they killed you mother and father. Stupid and weak._

Black closed, her eyes, squeezing out the tears of fear and pain and frustration, and tried to retreat to the dark corners in her mind.

She would never, ever escape.

There was a shudder that resonated through the floor, so slight that Black was not even sure she'd felt it at all. For a second, she believed she had imagined it, but not a moment later, another, deeper shockwave ran through the building, this one strong enough for the doctor and two guards to register. Over their heads, the large halogen light flickered slightly.

There was a long pause before Doctor Bailey spoke.

"What..." she began, stopping and licking her lips before starting again, "What was-"

She was cut off by the wailing of an alarm and the flashing of a red light by the doorway, but neither mechanism had warned them in time for what came next: There was a deafening noise of screeching metal, and far wall of the infirmary seemed to disintegrate, pulverized by some colossal force on the other side, crushing steel and plastic and drywall indiscriminately.

It was not an explosion; The force would have driven them back. It looked almost as though the wall was being shredded by some unseen creature. Still Black could not see the source of the destruction through the haze of dust that had already blanketed the room in thick clouds. The explosions came afterward.

There was a sound, high pitched and cacophonous, and out of the dust and darkness on the other side of the destroyed wall, three glowing orbs flew through the air. They were bright, so much so that Black had to close her eyes as they travelled towards their targets, accompanied by a long whine like... fireworks?

The globes struck the doctor and two guards full in the chest, exploding with a pulse of energy and sending the three sprawling backward. Black's ears rang with the impact.

Somewhere far in the distance, she could feel the shudder of another impact. Then another. Then another. With each tremor, she could hear more alarms in the corridors. Something or someone was attacking the internment camp. An escape attempt, maybe? One more effective than her own?

Black heard the sound of boots stepping into the room, and instinctively, she scooted on her hands and knees under the gurney. Through the clearing dust she could see two pairs of feet.

"All clear. You must be getting' old, Wolvie. There's no one else in here," one voice said, a woman, "Movin' on. We've only got fifteen minutes, tops, before they can form a response."

"There _is_ someone else," another voice replied, this one terse and deep, "I can smell her."

Without knowing why, Black held her breath, as though not breathing could keep her hidden. Nearby, she could see her shiv where it had fallen to the ground. She reached out and picked it up, as quietly as she could.

With no warning, the smaller pair of feet walked over to the table, pivoted, and their owner bent down. Black withdrew quickly to the other side, not knowing what to expect, but found herself surprised to see the rather attractive face of a middle-aged Asian woman staring at her. She had a countenance that was slightly weather and marked in one or two places with thin, feint scars, but it was not unkind, with crow's feet and laugh lines around her eyes and mouth that were on their way to becoming very pronounced. Her attire, from what Black could see, was militaristic, with plates of armor on her chest and shoulders, but there was a slimness to the design that the uniforms of the camp's guards did not share. Over her chest was an insignia: A black circle with and 'X' drawn through it, over a field of red. The woman smiled, chewing a wad of gum loudly.

"She's here," the woman said to her companion, then reached under the table, "My name's Jubilee. Come on out. It's okay."

Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was confusion. Maybe it was the fact that the camp had made her inherently distrustful of anyone, especially those to tried to help her. Maybe it was a combination of all of those things, but rather than take the woman's hand, Vascha gripped the shiv in her fist and lashed out clumsily, doing her best to look fearsome, and knowing she was probably failing. She missed the woman's flesh by a good foot and a half.

Still, the Asian woman frowned and jerked her hand back. She looked up at her unseen companion and shrugged.

"She's got a knife."

Black heard a low, growling noise and the sound of heavy footfalls muffled slightly by the thick soles of combat boots.

"We don't have time for this," she heard the male voice grunt.

The table Black had retreated under gave a start as it was lifted completely off the ground and tossed to one side. Black let out a yelp of surprise and looked up.

He was shorter than most men she had ever encountered, but he was still taller than her or his partner who had named herself Jubilee. His hair and short beard were a deep black, salted with grey on his cheeks and temples. He wore a bandana low over his brow, but that seemed to do very little to tame his locks, which swept backwards on his head like a matted animal pelt. He wore a uniform similar to Jubilee's, with less armor and arms exposed from the bicep to the wrist, revealing bulging, corded muscle beneath tanned skin and coarse body hair. His face was hard, as though made of old, aged leather, with eyes that seemed almost perpetually covered in a shadow formed by his pronounced, low-set brow.

"Can you stand?" he asked, his gaze like the beam of a laser.

Black could form no response, and stared at the man stupidly.

"Logan, look at her," Jubilee said in a hushed tone, "She looks like a skeleton. I'd be surprised if she could walk three feet."

The man, Logan, sighed and walked towards her, reaching out to her with one hand.

Panic gripped Black once again, and she closed her eyes and again lashed out with her makeshift blade, not paying attention to where she stabbed the air with it. She was shocked when she felt her arm meet resistance, and looked up.

The shiv had struck the man in the center of his gloved hand, but had not penetrated more than a few millimeters past the tip. At first, Black rationalized that his gloves must have been armored, but no, she saw drops of blood begin to slide down her lumpy, crude weapon onto her own fingers. She looked at the man, a wave of terror rushing up her spine.

Remarkably, he looked only mildly irritated as he plucked the shiv out of her hand and looked at it, pulling the tip out of the meat of his hand. He regarded Black for a moment, smiled, and tossed the small knife back to her. Black caught it clumsily in both hands.

"Keep it. You might need it."

Black looked at the man named Logan, looked at the Asian woman named Jubilee, then down at the makeshift weapon in her hands.

"_Spasibo_," she said, and then switching to English, "Are you here to get me out?"

Jubilee tapped her head in a strange sort of salute and, smiling, said, "The cavalry is here."

"Russian," Logan observed, "Colossus is gonna be thrilled."

Black put one foot under her, and then the other, and shakily rose to her feet. Jubilee moved forward to steady her, but Logan put a hand on the woman's shoulder, gently stopping her.

"Can you walk yourself out of here?" he asked, "Or do you need to be carried?"

"I can walk," Black muttered. These people, whoever they were, were obviously in a hurry. She didn't want to give them any cause to leave her behind. Pity was a rare commodity, one she rarely saw in her own life, and she wasn't about to expect any now.

She took a step forward, felt the strength leave her leg below the knee, and felt herself begin to fall. She threw her arms out, trying to latch onto something to regain her balance. Instead, something latched onto her. A hand, with a grip like an iron vice, but still careful not to squeeze her arm too hard, snatched her up by the arm near her elbow, steadying her. Black looked up and saw Logan's face.

"She's too weak," he said, "She won't make it."

Black felt her stomach drop. He was going to leave her. Through sheer, blind luck, she had happened upon the only chance of real escape that she would ever get, and she was going to be left behind, because her terrible plan had made it necessary to starve herself to the point of being near death. She knew what these two people might be thinking; She was too weak to be worth saving.

To her shock, Logan put an arm behind her waist, lifted her off her feet, and heaved her into his arms. He hefted her body as though she weighed no more than a few pounds. He looked down at her.

"Got a name, kid?"

"Black. I mean... Vascha. Vascha Aleksandrov."

"Well, 'Black'," Logan said, "We're gonna get you out of here. I want you to close your eyes and hold onto me, okay?"

Overwhelmed by the night's events, unable to even fully process what was going on around her, weak from exertion and starvation and water poisoning, Black did not need to be told twice. She grabbed portions of Logan's armor in her small fists and held on tight, closing her eyes and burying her face into his chest. Tears of pain and joy streamed down her face.

"I want to go home," she whispered, just before slipping into unconsciousness. For the first time, she realized that she had no idea where that might have been.

She hoped that Behemoth would make it out with her.


	3. A Rendezvous with Death

_It may be he should take my hand_

_And lead me into his dark land_

_And close my eyes and quench my breath-_

_It may be I should pass him still._

_I have a rendezvous with Death_

_On some scarred slope of battered hill..._

_...And I to my pledged word am true,_

_I shall not fail that rendezvous._

-_Alan Seeger_

_**Somewhere in the New Mexico desert**_

"It's called Tempest."

Ben, Gansükh, Rin, and Hunter each sat silently in the dark and long-abandoned garage, the only illumination coming from the steady red glow of a small field light, and waited for Travis to continue. This discussion was long overdue, but tonight was the first time in days that there had not been some pressing matter on their agenda of survival, be it scavenging for parts with which to repair their battered shuttle, investigate some disturbance for signs of a threat, or tend to wounds that seemed to get worse before they got better.

"When SHIELD brought Sinister on to design the Terminus virus, it was considered a doomsday scenario, an absolute last resort in the mutant/human conflict. Keep in mind, this is late in the last century, before mutants had people like Charles Xavier to speak on their behalf. Everyone was scared. No one knew what was going to happen. Terminus was just one on a long list of proposals to wipe out mutants if the need arose."

Travis paused for a moment and rubbed his eyes, as though even the limited light of their temporary base camp was too much. It was fatigue, Ben knew. Since the crash three days ago, none of them had managed to sleep very much. Even with his injuries well on their way to mending with the advanced first aid technology that Travis had managed to smuggle onto the shuttle, Ben could still not find himself resting comfortably. His thoughts were wound up like a knot, circumventing even the pain he felt in the closing hole in his guts where X-23's claw had pierced him. Travis sighed and continued.

"It was intended to be a two-stage system. First, the mutant population would be infected, then, if they could not be controlled through fear and reduced breeding, the second stage, Tempest, would be put into effect. A specific frequency that could be broadcast from SHIELD's communications array that would effectively lobotomize the mutant population. Turning them into..."

"Into what we saw on the Helicarrier," Gansükh supplied.

"Why wasn't it ever used?" Hunter asked.

"Because Terminus was never supposed to have been finished," Travis said, perhaps with a bit more clipped tone in his voice than usual, "Sinister told SHIELD brass that, while the first stage of Terminus could be created rather easily, he was unable to create a suitable antivirus, and claimed that the virulent science behind the proposed Tempest contingency was impossible. So SHIELD canned the project."

"But did not destroy it," Rin said.

"No," Travis admitted, "It was placed under lockdown at the highest level of security. By the time Sinister had released it and SHIELD realized what had happened, it was too late. Thinking that it had been an accident, and knowing there was no cure, it was decided to bury SHIELD's entire involvement with the project. Only a small handful of people on the planet knew about it."

"You knew all of this before we were even involved," Ben said, the words like lead weights on his chest as his body still attempted to heal the string of wounds that had been inflicted upon it. His arm throbbed where Vascha's blade had passed clean through the muscle of the tricep.

Travis looked at each of them in turn before slowly nodding. "Yes. I did. I've been breaking into SHIELD's encrypted files for years, ever since I became an agent. I've seen just about every dirty little secret that SHIELD has ever cooked up."

Ben could practically feel the wave of anger that passed over each of them, could detect it as plainly as if they had each sprouted thorns of rage through their skin. But it passed, and they did not give voice to their dark emotions. The fact remained that none of this information would have saved Vascha or Ciara, and realistically would probably not have changed the course of the past week in the slightest. They had each of them been driven by an incessant need for vengeance for their slain master, Logan, not by a thirst for the truth behind Terminus. In a strange, sad way, Ben supposed that mutants in general had given up vexing on the virus that doomed their race to infertility long ago, like a whole species of terminal cancer patients, simply waiting to die. In the end, it did not matter who created it, or why. In the end, Travis had risked his life to save theirs, and while his motives for such actions were still not entirely clear, it was enough that the four of them would let him speak without giving in to the swells of anger that were sure to burn inside them as he continued his story.

"And now there's Ominous," Gansükh said, idly fingering the blade of a combat knife, scratching the ridges under his nails with the tip.

"It stands to reason that most humans are still relatively safe from the Tempest signal," Travis mused, "From what I've been able to pick up on the news nets, only populations that have been caught directly in the Ark's path have seen real neurological degradation, so for the time being it seems to have a limited range. But there's no chance that Sinister doesn't have something in mind to boost the signal to make it more widespread. Hell, with the tech on board the Ark, he could be hacking into communications satellites right now. With the Helicarrier down, most of SHIELD's ability to stop that sort of thing is crippled. So is SHIELD itself now, for that matter."

"What are the reports from areas that have been affected?" Hunter asked, his voice croaking a bit, still slightly raspy under the necklace of bruising he still wore around he neck and shoulders, courtesy of Gorgeous George.

"Hard to say. Remember that there's no real system of tracking that sort of thing in this part of the world anymore. There's no government or armed forces or even police. It's mostly loosely-knit communities of traders, farmers, and hunter gatherers, with a few clans of pirates and gangsters and militia groups mixed in. Even of things fell into total chaos, it wouldn't look all that different from what it was before."

Ben could see his point. After he'd managed to save most of their shuttle from any real damage during their crash, he'd still been forced to move the ship upon waves of earth for almost eight hours before they'd come across the old highway motor garage that they had been holed up in for nearly three days and nights now. The effort had nearly killed him, but even in a state of total exhaustion, Ben had taken note of the complete and total devastation of the landscape around them as the Helicarrier had burned in the distance behind them, a tower of smoke and fire. Cars, homes, stores that dotted the sparse landscape were all decrepit and abandoned. There was quite simply nothing here anymore. The entire United States had become one big ghost town. It was one thing to hear about it. It was quite another to actually see it.

"Why?"

They each turned to face Rin, silently waiting for her to continue.

"Why go through all the trouble of infiltrating SHIELD and discovering these secrets? Why take that chance? Why devote yourself to it if you never intended on doing anything to stop it? Why help us now?"

Travis took a long moment to answer, his face grimacing as he looked upward, apparently trying to find the words he needed. Ben didn't blame him. If SHIELD had never detected his deception, it was because the man had guarded his intentions more closely than most people would ever feel the need to guard anything in their lives. It was likely no easy task to abandon those pretenses.

"When I began working under SHIELD," he began, "I was under the employ of another organization that sought to undermine their authority, to make sure that SHIELD and the United States government never returned to a full seat of power. Realistically, this entire mess is largely the fault of those two factions. If you'd like to put it plainly, I was a cyber-terrorist, leaking information about SHIELD as I went up in ranks. But then..."

"What happened?" Gansükh prompted.

Travis frowned. "It's not an easy thing when you discover that you've been working to undermine one militaristic, overwrought giant only to discover that the one's you're working for only ever intended to take its place. I cut ties from my employers a little over a year ago, and up until the Ark situation I was treading water, biding my time. Then I met you," he looked at them each in turn, "I saw in you an opportunity to stop Sinister's plans yes, but also to possibly undermine SHIELD's attempts to dominate the world stage again without worrying about whether you would seek to exploit what you learned for personal gain. I was certain that you would uncover the truth."

"That's why you had the shuttle ready," Gansükh said, making the connection.

"Yes. I knew that, no matter what, SHIELD was likely to still try and hold you captive, especially with everything that you learned on the Ark. There was never any chance that you would leave their custody. I had planned to smuggle you out quietly. But we all know how that turned out."

Travis looked at them again, each in turn.

"For what it's worth, your lost teammates have my deepest sympathies, as do you. I am sorry to have deceived you all. I never imagined that Sinister would have become so powerful. I never even guessed that Ominous would be so widespread, or what he would be willing to do with it. He made everything we planned for, everything _I _planned for, look foolish by comparison."

"Because he's not just trying to gain some kind of foothold," Ben said, "Or initiate some kind of power struggle. He's trying to reshape the earth, change the way the whole thing works. Terminus and Ominous are proof enough of that. The Ark is just a segment of a larger piece."

"Which is why we still need to stop him, no matter what," Travis said, and produced a small holographic tablet computer from one of them many satchels and cases that he had taken from the shuttle. He thumbed a switch on the side and the images displayed on its glass surface leapt into the air above their heads.

It displayed a very rough representation of the former United States, with certain areas highlighted or shaded to denote territories and other tactical information. Most prominently, large red circles glowed over three distinct locations. In one corner, New York City have been singled out. In the relative center, what Ben guessed was their approximate location in the New Mexico desert was designated. A third location, to their north and nestled somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, was mysterious to him.

"Whatever he's planning to do with the Ark," Travis began, "He's calling mutants to his cause on the island of Manhattan. We don't know if that location has any true significance to his plans, or if it is simply convenient to drawing the largest number of mutants in the shortest amount of time. Likewise, we don't know if he actually requires mutants for the inner workings of his strategy, or if they're simply a buffer zone, meant to scare away humans on top of the threat of the Tempest signal. Lastly, we have no idea if the 'cure' he refers to in his broadcast is anything more than a deception to draw more to his cause, but I would wager that it is. One thing we do know is that mutants will flock to him like nothing we've ever seen. There are no concrete figures as to how many mutants still exist, but conservatively, there will likely be several thousands there within days, and many more in the coming weeks. In a way, we can use that to our advantage."

Travis swept a hand over the display, and the holographic map zoomed in to the area surrounding New York City.

"Rin and Gansükh will use the shuttle to get as close to the island as possible without drawing attention to themselves. Once on the ground, they will begin a mission of scouting and reconnaissance. If possible, they will try to uncover any details about Sinister's plan, as well as disrupt any of his operations without becoming discovered. Ideally, they will also attempt to draw mutants away from Sinister's cause, but without any hard data to use as leverage against him, the chances of that are relatively slim. It will be the information gathered in the coming days that will help us to form a new plan to kill Sinister and shut down the Ark."

"We tried that already," Hunter pointed out, "The bastard is practically immortal. We couldn't touch him and we had SHIELD's resources on our side. What's going to change that?"

A memory rang in Ben's head like a bell. Something odd that Travis had said just before everything on the Helicarrier had gone sideways.

"You mentioned that we would find help," he ventured, "from Charles Xavier."

"Yes," Travis nodded.

"Who has been dead for decades," Rin added.

"I know," Travis said with a small smile, "But he can still help us."

The map zoomed out, panned over to the mysterious third glowing dot, and began to zoom in again.

"The Colorado base!" Hunter said suddenly, apparently just as surprised by his own outburst as the rest of them.

"Yes," Travis said, then looked at Ben, Gansükh, and Rin, "By the time Logan had recruited you, he was acting independently, and had already settled into Yuriko's estate as a base of operations. Months before that, he had been stationed at the last remaining X-Men facility in the mountains of Colorado, where Hunter, Vascha, and Ciara were kept after their rescue from the deteriorating conditions in the United States. By that point, the country's infrastructure had more or less evaporated, but the internment camps and military groups still functioned with some regularity."

Ben nodded. He remembered now the vague, harrowing stories that Ciara, Hunter, and Vascha had shared about their last days in the dying country. In a strange way, he had always been somewhat jealous of their time spent there. While the X-Men had disbanded and abandoned the facility not long after Logan and his charges had left, those three members of the team had actually met living, breathing X-Men. Though by their accounts, the legendary group had dwindled down to a scant handful at that point, comprised mostly of mutants too old or too crippled to do any good any more. Nevertheless, X-Men were the closest thing to heroes that Ben had ever heard of.

He frowned and squeezed his eyes shut at the pain that thinking of Ciara and Vascha brought him. He still harbored some small hope that either could still be alive. Vascha's fate was a mystery to them, and he had seen Ciara's disastrous fall from the air, could remember the halo of blood that had formed around her head when she had landed in the hard New Mexico earth, but both girls were among the toughest and most stubborn people he'd ever met. Until he saw their bodies for himself, he'd probably never give up on the hope that they lived still.

"How does an abandoned X-Men base have any bearing on Charles Xavier?" Gansükh asked, uncharacteristically impatient, "And how does he relate to us killing Sinister?"

"It's not the facility itself," Travis intoned, his voice growing suddenly quiet, "It's what's inside. Have any of you ever heard of the Xavier Protocols?"

Each of them turned and looked at one another, slowly shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders. They hadn't.

"When the X-Men disbanded," Travis began, "Their abandoned bases and command centers became some of the most sought-after sites during and after the peak of the human/mutant conflicts. The technology and documentation hidden in them was a veritable gold mine to anyone who know how to find them. SHIELD itself managed to lay claim to the majority of them, including the facility in Colorado. In its computers we found intel that allowed us to make some of our greatest leaps in research and development, using the detailed notes and schematics kept there, created with the expressed purpose of replicating mutant abilities. That's where our scientists got the intel they needed to crack personal teleportation technology."

"So SHIELD stole a bunch of shit that they had no right to take, and it made your science geeks piss their pants," Hunter said, obviously irritated by the idea of people poking around in places that were probably as close to sacred to him as any location could get. "What's the point?"

"The point is," Travis said, "There's one thing we could never gain access to."

Travis swept a hand over the display and instantly the air above the device exploded with blueprints, maps, schematic, and too much information for Ben to process at once. It took a moment, but he finally realized that he was looking at the layout of the X-Men's Colorado facility. It was big. Bigger than Ben could wrap his head around at first glance. It must have gone down close to fifty stories below the surface of the mountain it was nestled into. Level upon level flew by in the holographic representation before finally settling on one in particular.

"Within the same area that houses a device that Xavier called 'Cerebro,'" Travis pointed the area out on the wire-frame blueprint, "There is a massive computer system that designated itself 'The Xavier Protocols.' That is what we're after."

"What is it?" Ben asked.

"We were only able to get past a few walls of encryption before we hit a failsafe that even we couldn't crack," Travis admitted, "But from what we could discern, the Xavier Protocols are details instructions on how to kill any living mutant."

There was a long pause as Travis' words sunk in.

"No way," Hunter said, the first to break the silence, waving a hand in the air, "Xavier was all about peace and understanding and pacifism. He wouldn't do something like that."

"I can assure you, Mr Burden, that creating a super-powered militaristic counter-terrorism squad is anything but pacifism," Travis remarked, "Charles Xavier was about one thing; Saving lives, both human and mutant, and recognizing that in the face of unrelenting hatred or violence, sometimes peace, even if it's a temporary one, means having a bigger stick than the other guy. Take Logan, for example. For all intense and purposes, he was a killing machine, brutal and untrustworthy. Yet Xavier went above and beyond his normal efforts to both recruit and keep Logan on his side. A man who had been professionally slaughtering people for the better part of a century. Why? Because the socio-political climate back then was like a neighborhood with a rabid dog in every yard. Xavier found the biggest, meanest pit bull around to make sure no one ever brought the fight to his door. And for a long time it worked. Xavier was a practical man. A measured, calculating man. And a man who was never above sacrificing himself or anyone else if it meant saving lives or fostering an enduring peace. Which is exactly why he created the Protocols."

Travis stopped enough for his point to take hold. Ben could see Hunter deflate slightly, his eyes lowering a touch. The boy was not used to having his vision of the X-Men or Logan shaken. Neither, for that matter, was Ben.

"Even though we couldn't get at it," Travis continued, "We were able to glean an idea of the information. For decades after he conceived and created the telepathy-amp called Cerebro, Xavier used it to painstakingly scan and document every mutant that he could detect. While this was done in part simply for research and census data, as well as occasional recruitment or rescue missions, it also had another purpose. Every time Xavier discovered a new mutant that he deemed a credible threat, he devoted a portion of his time thinking of ways to kill them, should the need arise."

"How can you be sure?" Rin asked.

"I'm not. Not one hundred percent, at least," Travis admitted, "We've actually been uncertain for a long time. Some people still doubt it. It's entirely possible that the files themselves don't exist, and this was some backup plan that never saw fruition. But during my short time there, I installed a monitoring program that logs any time the facility is entered and the Protocols are used. You see, the reason we could get at the meat of the data is actually pretty brilliant: Humans can't access it. Period. There's a biometric scanner built into the computer that puts a lock on it whenever humans are detected. Hell, it even does that when most _mutants_ try to use it. Trying to extract the data or even disassemble the hardware results in a total data wipe, so SHIELD opted to keep it intact and dormant until their scientists could crack it, which they never could. As far as we can tell, the Protocols will only open completely to an X-Man, or the direct relative of one."

Without thinking, they each turned and looked at Hunter. As Ororo Munroe's grand-nephew, he was the closest thing they were likely to find.

"But like I said," Travis continued, "Most of us had doubts as to whether the Protocols actually existed in the computer at all. Until my scanning program picked this up."

A measure of code jumped out at them from the hologram and opened itself, revealing a file or dossier of sorts, but rather than basic personnel information, this one detailed what looked like genetic code. It was highlighted as a person who had been granted access to the Protocols.

"This is the biometric signature of X-23," Travis said, "She accessed the Protocols almost two years ago. A year later, Logan was killed."

Apparently, Travis had thought that the information might have shocked or angered them, but Ben was not entirely surprised to find that it ignited only a mild form of annoyance in him. At this point, with all the layers upon layers of conspiracy that had been uncovered to them in the past week, it would take a lot to press his buttons. Judging from the nonchalant expressions on the faces of his teammates, they were of a similar mindset.

"So whatever they did to murder him," Hunter said, "They used what X-23 learned to help cook it up."

"It's a theory," Travis said, "Sinister is brilliant enough to come up with something on his own, but it seems far too coincidental that she accessed the files so close to his death. People had been trying to kill Logan for over a hundred years before this, and have failed every time. I'm almost certain that the Protocols exist. I think that there was a very detailed, very precise set of instructions on how to capture and kill Logan, and it was followed to the letter."

"So if Xavier kept such good records," Gansükh mused, "You're betting that he had a write up on Sinister."

"I'd stake my life on it. He's only become a truly global threat recently, but Xavier had to have been keeping track of him over the years, if for no other reason than his ideals bordered on the radical. I'm hoping that whatever we find in there, it will lead us to a solution that will help us think of something that Sinister hasn't considered."

"But if he knows about the Protocols," Ben said, "Wouldn't it stand to reason that he would have instructed X-23 to wipe his entry?"

Travis shrugged. "My monitoring programs are good, but they're not perfect. I admit that it's possible, but from what I've been able to scan, the files have never been tampered with, only observed. And no one else has accessed them in the past two years. One of Sinister's greatest flaws is his arrogance. It's true that he has altered his body to be very close to immortal, so he may have simply not bothered with it."

The former SHIELD agent swept his hand over the display a final time and the hologram went dead.

"So," Gansükh said, breaking the lapse of silence, "Two of us infiltrate Manhattan, while the other three travel to Colorado for some key piece of information on Sinister that might not exist, and then what? That still leaves quite a bit of terrain separating us. Without some kind of air travel it would be days before we could rendezvous, and who knows how long Sinister needs to start pushing his plans forward. He might land tomorrow and start nuking. Just because he didn't before doesn't mean he won't now."

"I know it's not a perfect plan," Travis said, "But everything you see here, the gear that I brought with me that we managed to get off the Helicarrier? That is literally the terminating point of our support. The SHIELD network has gone dead, and with everything going to hell here, none of my contacts are willing to lend any sort of aid. I've even tried contacting Yuriko, but she seems to have gone dark as well, probably anticipating some kind of retribution from Sinister. We're as alone as alone gets on this, so I'm telling you that, as we are, we don't stand a chance of taking him out without some new intel. And I'm telling you that there are only two places I know of that might have that: The Colorado facility, and Manhattan. As far as getting the Colorado team back to the east coast... I guess we're just going to have to wing it."

"No we're not."

Again, they each turned to look at Hunter, who had begun to tense his brow in thought.

"Well, _maybe_ not, anyway. You said that SHIELD got their ideas for teleportation from research data at recovered X-Men facilities," Hunter pointed at Travis, "That's not true. They got the idea for that technology by copying technology that already physically existed."

"What?" Travis looked genuinely confused.

"Look, I don't know what your higher-ups as SHIELD told you, but personal teleporting wasn't just some side project in a filing cabinet somewhere at the facility. It was something that was actively being worked on while I was there. Nightcrawler and Forge used to keep themselves up for days arguing about it. It was one of their top priorities. The X-Men ranks were dwindling, their top operators were getting old, their resources were depleting, so they needed new ways to try and insert their people and extract mutants from hot zones and internment camps. It's another long shot, but I'll bet my left arm that there's something close to a working version of the CHB tech we used at the Ark."

"But that only worked one way," Ben pointed out.

"_SHIELD's_ version only worked one way. I'm sure their research and development was good, but they didn't have mutant-powered intellects on their side, or people who could actively teleport that they could study. Who knows what the X-Men might have come up with that SHIELD couldn't duplicate? It's another long shot, but if I'm wrong we wouldn't be in a worse position than we were before. We'd just have to hoof it to New York any way we could. It would take longer, but we'd get there."

"Who knows," Travis admitted, "We've had nothing but bad luck for quite awhile. Might be time for some good."

Ben found himself staring in the air where the map and the schematics had hung only moments before. For some reason, he thought of the day when Logan had taken each of them aside in turn to have a private conversation. None of them had known why. It was before their training had begun in earnest. For each of them, Ben included, their lives had been a whirlwind of hardship and violence and, in some cases, imprisonment. The gardens of Yuriko's estate had been like an alien world, and Logan, the man whose care they had fallen under, was like something brought to life out of legend.

"Benjamin," Logan had said, his voice dark and rough as it always was, "I want to train you to defend yourself. More than that, I want to train you to defend other people. This world is goin' to hell fast, and I don't know that anyone can stop that anymore. But there are people out there, good people like you, who are hurtin', and the list of people who can do a damn thing about it is shrinkin' fast."

"Okay," Ben had said, maybe a little too eagerly, "I mean, yes sir."

His father had served in the military, and Ben remembered when the man had playfully pretended to drill him like a little soldier when he was five, or maybe six. His father and mother had grinned and chuckled as Ben had attempted a salute while drowning inside of the olive-drab jacket that had been thrown around his tiny shoulders. Still, the terminology had not been forgotten, and Logan struck Ben as the type of man that wanted to be addressed in that clipped, military tone.

"No," Logan shook his head slowly, surprising Ben, "You're not joining the army, kid. This ain't hero work you're signing up for. You're a mutant. A powerful one at that, and you're put in the unique and arguably unfair position of decidin' what you're gonna do with that ability. If you agree to stay here with me, you're agreeing to doing the dirty work that needs doing in the world, because the time for talkin' things out and wearing uniforms is already done and over with. I want you to understand what I'm offering you, and what I'm askin' in return. You'll be part of a team, you'll be making' a difference, but you'll be called a lot of things. Terrorist. Freak. Thug. You'll probably have to do things that most people would shy away from. I can prepare you for it, make you strong enough to face it, but in the end, you'll have to make a choice. Can you live with that?"

It had not occurred to Ben until years later how desperate Logan had been in those days. The questions that he had put to each of them, the fate he had asked them to decide for themselves, it wasn't fair or right to ask that of children. He knew that now. Nevertheless, Ben could safely say that he and his teammates had done far more good than bad in their lives, saved more people than they had killed. But Logan had been right. They weren't heroes. Not the way the X-Men were. They had each forfeited that when they had slipped out of the shadows and killed without hesitation. Always it had been people who more than deserved it, but that did not make him any less of a killer, an assassin. One day he would have to answer for it, but he regretted none of it. In the end, he didn't blame Logan. In the end, he still thanked him.

He did not know why, but Ben suddenly found the need to chuckle. Lightly, under his breath at first, but soon it was a deliberate, guffawing noise from deep in his chest. His teammates gave him measured looks, as though he might have gone crazy, and Ben could not be certain that he hadn't. Finally, the fit seemed to pass, and Ben looked at them as though they had missed some great joke.

"I just can't believe that we're going to do it again," he explained, "After everything that happened, this world is legitimately so fucked up that we literally have no other choice. We're bound by honor, each of us, but even if I stood up right now and said to hell with it all... what then? I can't see my family. I wouldn't be able to walk ten steps in Israel before getting picked up or maybe just capped in the back of the head. I can't stay here. And anywhere else in the world is just as vulnerable to Sinister as anywhere else. This is the only thing I know how to do, and the real kicker is that it's probably the only thing left that I _can_ do." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, it's just... how the hell could fate let this happen? How did all the events of history boil down to five people in a garage in the American wasteland deciding whether or not they're willing to get put through the grinder for humanity again?"

He had halfway expected some kind of rebuke from one of his teammates, but was surprised to find Hunter nodding grimly.

"I know," he said, "I mean, Logan never let us have any illusions about what we were choosing by training under him. I know you have to be willing to die to do what we do. But still, this whole fate of the world stuff... That's not what he trained us for. It's hero schtick. X-Men material. We're assassins. Mutant boogeymen that human soldiers tell stories about. I guess I just never thought much about what dying might mean for the rest of the world. Now it looks like it might mean everything."

Ben padded the larger boy lightly in his shoulder with a balled fist. Apparently Hunter had been thinking the exact same thing.

"Those who can do something," Gansükh mused, setting his jaw and putting away his combat knife, "_Must_ do something. We've been operating on the assumption that we were only doing this for Logan, but that's not really true, is it? We have to do this because we're the only ones who can. Probably the only ones who _will_."

Ben heard an audible sigh, and they turned to look at Rin, who had stayed relatively silent in the passing days, speaking only to ask a question or assert her point of view, then falling into deep, meditative quiet again. She turned and looked up to face them, more for their benefit than her own. With her acute hearing and blind, cloudy eyes, she needn't look at anything to know where it was. She looked tired, more so than the rest of them. Ben was fairly certain she had had the least amount of sleep. He had caught her several times in the night sitting on the bare floor, her knees tucked under her, as she lowered her head and clasped her hands, bowing over the adamantium swords that Madame Yuriko had gifted to her. What she was praying for, Ben did not know, and did not ask.

"Fate," the young Japanese girl began, "Is rarely kind to those with the ability to change world events. Often those crucial moments occur at a time that is the least convenient. Maybe it is finally time that we stopped fighting what destiny seems insistent on bestowing on us." She turned her face towards Gansükh. "You're right. This is not about Logan anymore. It's not about us, either. It's about Vascha and Ciara. It's about every human and mutant that may perish by course of our inaction. We can no longer ask ourselves what we have been trained to do, but rather, what _they_ would have us do."

Ben nodded vigorously, feeling the weight, the truth in her words. He stood, looking at each of his teammates and then Travis.

"Same song, second verse," he smiled humorlessly, "Sinister dies, or we do."

"So," Gansükh said, turning to Travis, "What comes first?"


	4. The Rat, the Rabbit, and the Wraith

Manhattan Island had been a city once, or so Bridget had been told. Now it was a graveyard. If the stories were at all based on truth, the massive collection of dull gray spires that had once been habitable buildings had served to form the foundation of a massive empire, a metropolis that had not been equalled in its time. The long streets, which stretched too far in either direction for Bridget to see their end with her naked eyes, had once bustled with more people than a person could count. All around her were traces of life and society left behind to the elements. Signs that stood long dormant and abandoned, some so large that Bridget struggled to imagine how they had been secured to the buildings, had once pulsed with electric lights at all hours of the day, or so she was told. The hollow, immobile metal husks that now crowded the avenues like hundreds upon thousands of huge, dead insects had once been cars, modes of transportation that moved immeasurable numbers of humans from place to place. The tunnels beneath her feet, where few mutants dared to venture nowadays, had housed a network of trains that were like the arteries and veins of the vast city.

All of these facts seemed dubious at best as Bridget reached down where the pavement of the street had cracked, plucked a dandelion that had bloomed in the hard gravel beneath at some point in the last day or so, sniffed it with her sensitive, pink-tipped nose, and tossed it into her mouth. The only sound within the canyons of withering concrete that loomed around her was the gnashing of her teeth as she chewed. It did not satisfy the hunger pangs that pulsed in the pit of her stomach with what seemed to her like more frequency than usual, but it helped.

She stood on 52nd Street and Broadway, but the significance of those denominations had no resonance with her. She used the terms only out of habit, as that was how the streets had been labeled a long time ago, before she had been born, before the city had been abandoned to the gangs and mutant communities, and it was as good a system as any to remember where she was. Certain areas had been subsequently renamed since mutants had become the majority of what scant population remained, of course. The dark pit of rubble and ruined buildings that the older adults still referred to as Times Square was simply called 'The Coffin' by Bridget and her companions. It was a dead place. A quiet place that no one traversed. Other streets had been renamed after heroes who had fallen there during the war or who held some place of significance in mutant history. There was Shadowcat Street, Cannonball's Crater, Cyclops Alley, and Magneto's Fist. In other places, the old buildings themselves had taken on new monikers, depending on who resided within, or what had transpired there in the past; Headstone Heights, the Dragon's Tooth, and of course, the Duke's Tower.

Bridget turned to the south and gazed up where the Duke's Tower loomed in the distance. It was an older building, of that much she was certain, with a textured, geometric surface that tapered towards the top like a needle surging upward into the sky. It was the tallest building on the island of Manhattan, though she was informed that this was not always so. The Dragon's Tooth, the adults told her, had once been called Freedom Tower, and had stretched smooth and gleaming into the sky even higher than Duke's Tower. That seemed unbelievable to her, especially since the Tooth was only about three quarters the size of most buildings around it, jagged and broken as though it had been cleaved apart by a gigantic blade.

She took a last look at the Duke's Tower and fought a chill. She knew full well that the top floors of any building in the city were by and large uninhibited, and the Tower was no exception; Years of neglect and structural abuse from the war made living in the taller buildings suicidal. But still, she could not fight the distinct feeling that the Dukes of New York were up there, watching her even now.

Usually, she had never even needed to interact with the self-appointed rulers of the island. Her tiny mutant clan operated independently, outside of the influence of the mutant gangs and syndicates that functioned under the control of the Dukes. That did not make them free to do what they wished, however. In one way or another, everyone who lived on the island paid their dues to the Dukes and their Marauders, sometimes in ways more horrible than Bridget liked to recall. Everything had changed since the Sinister broadcast, however, and she and her companions had been informed that neutrality was no longer an option. If they wanted the security that the Dukes offered, they would need to do more than make the odd food delivery or, in Bridget's case, spend a night enduring the 'hospitality' of the Dukes' lieutenants. That had been a terrible night, but no worse than any other young mutant girl on the island had to endure. After all, what choice did any of them have?

Bridget herself was not certain what to make of the Sinister transmission. Certainly a cure for Terminus was a good and welcome thing, or at least the adults seemed to think so, but something about this strange man named Sinister's intentions made her wary. It sounded as though he was daring humans to bring a new war to the doorstep of Manhattan Island, or Morlock Island as some had taken to calling it, and that didn't sit well with her at all. From what she had experienced at the hands of the island's other inhabitants, she was not even certain that mutants being unable to breed was such a bad thing, though she spoke those concerns to no one.

In the end, word was passed down the pipe that the Dukes had decided that Sinister would be welcome to add his strength to theirs in making the mutant cause stronger, but declaring the island his own, planting a flag of a new nation without the Dukes' consent? That was another matter entirely, and not one that would be tolerated. So while the larger gangs under the Dukes' control readied themselves for a fight, smaller groups' like Bridget's clan, had been charged with scavenging and acting as sentries and lookouts for Sinister and whatever army he had amassed behind him.

The scavenging was no challenge. It was the only real skill that Bridget had managed to hone in her years of living in the hollowed-out shell of a city. It was true that, in the haste of their evacuation, the humans had left precious little behind in terms of the resources they had deemed valuable at the time; Batteries, gasoline, perishable food and the like. But there were still untold amounts of supplies for the bare essentials of living. Food and clothing, while they had been stripped from the most obvious of places, could still be found if one knew where to look, and Bridget had become especially adept at knowing where to look. Basements of what had formerly been stores or shops of some kind that sold food in years past were always an easy target, but those pickings had become slim as time had gone on. Besides that, she had mapped almost by heart every overgrown garden and collection of plant life on the island, where fruits and vegetables that had once been subject to careful, controlled cultivation now teemed with overgrown produce. Some of her clan still hopefully requested meat, but she left that task to her comrades. The thought of hunting and killing an animal, eating its flesh, had always bothered her.

She looked up into the sky, her long, rabbit-like ears pricking up slightly as she peered into the hazy clouds of the mid-morning sky. She did not know exactly what she was searching for. In his transmission, Sinister had mentioned that he would be arriving by airship, but in truth she had very little idea of what exactly that was. Something told her she would know it when she saw it, but that had not stopped her from peering into the heavens at every bird and insect that managed to catch her attention.

Abruptly, a small, grey cat hopped up onto the rusted hulk of a car nearby and mewed intently at her.

Not many people could easily differentiate between an average feral cat and one that Damien had possessed, but Bridget could spot the signs easily now. There was a cloudy darkness in the animal's eyes and a deliberate, distinctively non-animal attitude in its movements. It was more relaxed than any normal animal in broad daylight had a right to be. Bridget smiled at the cat and walked towards it, hopping slightly on her large, powerful feet with each stride.

"Hi Damien," she said, raising a hand to wave, "Anything to report?"

The cat blinked, yawned, and shrugged its tiny shoulders. To anyone that was not familiar with Damien's abilities, that would have come as a shock, but Bridget barely noticed the strangeness of the animal's human gestures.

Damien himself would be nearby, of course, but tucked into some hiding space so secluded and out of the way that there was no chance he would ever be found by any casual citizen of the island. His mutant ability to project his astral form out into the physical world, even possessing simple-minded creatures and machinery to a limited extent, would have made him formidable if not for the fact that his body, already hindered by a broken leg that had never healed properly and left him with a severe limp, was left inert and totally helpless while he did so.

There was an infinitesimal change in the cat's eyes, it's face, and Bridget knew that Damien was releasing the creature from his telepathic grasp. The feline blinked, shook its head, and hissed at Bridget in confusion and surprise when its senses finally returned. It darted from the roof of the abandoned vehicle, disappearing into the broken window of a nearby building.

There was a shimmering in the air nearby, and Bridget watched as the almost undetectable distortion in the atmosphere took on the shape of a human body, marking the space that Damien's astral form occupied. Of course, he could travel through the physical world without making such disturbances that gave away his position, but he had learned this trick to allow his friends to know where he 'was', which was useful. He could not speak to her directly in this form, but he could hear her, and when his astral body was nearby, Bridget could sometimes detect his emotions or responses to questions if he concentrated hard enough.

Just as quickly as it had appeared, though, the apparition faded. Bridget did some internal calculations and realized that Damien had probably been outside of his body for the maximum amount of time that he could be. He would make his way to her in his physical form in a few minutes.

"You let it get away."

Bridget turned, hopping on her bare, rabbit feet, to face the third member of the scavenging party.

"I did what?"

Rat, or Ratboy as nearly everyone else called him, seemed to materialize out of the scant shadows of the abandoned, garbage-strewn street as though by magic. With her large ears and delicate, sensitive nose, Bridget could usually detect any living thing that approached her, to a certain degree. Rat was another matter entirely. His feet, slender and pale and tipped with a thin claw on every toe, were naked at all times, much like her own, and the boy had all but mastered the art of moving silently on them. Though he was naturally thin and rail-like, he wore a plethora of rags and discarded clothing that seemed to add a bulkiness to his frame, obscuring his face under a hood of dirty material. Under that mass of garments, Rat, like any mutant, had a distinctive smell that Bridget could pick out of even the densest crowd, but his layers effectively masked his scent in a barrier of city aromas that she could not easily sort through. She supposed they had all mastered ways of not being detected, in some way or another.

Rat walked towards Bridget, a long length of metal pipe perched on one shoulder. He irritably gestured where the cat had been sitting on the car, his small, gleaming eyes piercing the shadow under his makeshift cowl.

"The cat, you let it get away," he pouted, his thin whiskers puckering, "I could have caught that."

Bridget wrinkled her nose. "Not cats," she said, almost pleading, "Rat, please don't start eating cats."

Rat grunted and chewed on the end of his metal pipe, which was already pock-marked with dents and scratches from his large, impossibly durable teeth. The rodent-like young mutant had a metabolism that demanded to be fed on an almost hourly basis, and Rat would eat literally anything to sate it. Of all the mutants on the island, he was the least likely to go hungry. She had personally seen him consume three empty glass bottles and half of a tire for dinner. It was part of what gave him a measure of notoriety on the island. There were rumors that he would even consume fellow mutants if given the chance, but Bridget knew that to be false. Laughable, even. Aside from his voracious appetite, Rat was one of the gentlest people she knew.

"What about squirrels?" Bridget asked, "Or raccoons?" The island was positively teeming with both, and were widely considered to be the greatest competition for food. Rats were another obvious choice if the boy insisted on hunting for meat, but she decided not to bring that up. She suspected that her companion had a natural affinity for the rodents that he shared a genome or two with. And, of course, if she brought up rats, he would almost certainly bring up rabbits, which, while rarer and harder to trap, still existed on the island in ready supply.

Rat seemed prepared to pursue the issue further, but then thought better of it and turned his attention to the sky.

"Seen anything?" he asked, not needing to be more specific. She knew what he was referring to.

"No," Bridget replied, likewise turning her gaze upward, her nose and ears twitching slightly as they tried to collect any new information, "Nothing yet."

"Me neither," a familiar voice called out.

They both turned to see Damien rounding the corner of a nearby cross street. With his dark sunglasses and walking stick, he could have been mistaken for being blind, but anyone who watched him walk for more than a second could easily see why he carried the long wooden pole. His left leg had been broken badly while he had been captive in a mutant internment camp as a child, little more than a toddler, really, and had not healed correctly. The limb twisted awkwardly below his knee, and Damien could not support weight on it for more than a few moments before it caused him pain. He used the length of wood as a crutch, grasping it firmly in both hands as he limped on his mangled leg. He had learned to move about as quickly as any average person who walked at a brisk pace, but demanding anything more than that of him was an exercise in futility.

Neither Bridget nor Rat made a move to assist him as he made his way toward them. Damien would have balked at their attempt if they had tried. The brown-haired, slightly freckled young mutant was particularly sensitive about his handicap, and trying to help him only made him more bristly and cold.

Like almost everyone on the island, including Bridget and Rat, he had an unhealthy, starved look to him, with a motley collection of found clothing that hung off of his slim body, fitting him badly. The collar of his shirt, pulled up high as it was, did little to hide the shiny pink ring of scar tissue that raised up around his neck where an inhibitor collar had been affixed for over a year of Damien's relatively short life. Nearly every mutant that had served time in a camp, including Rat, had similar marks.

Damien took one last look skyward before shrugging his shoulders. "Maybe he'll never come."

Bridget's rabbit-like nose twitched as she thought about that. It certainly was possible, but she didn't think so. The Dukes certainly seemed to believe that Sinister meant business.

"Anyway, come on," Damien motioned, "I think I found something."

* * *

They had made out better than Bridget would have expected. Damien had led them into the basement of a store that had at one point sold meat of some kind. At first, Bridget and Rat had protested, rankling their noses at the scent of decayed meat that had long since festered into little more than piles of dry maggot food in the shop's broken glass cases, but Damien had urged them on. In the basement, hidden behind a veritable mountain of discarded trash left in the wake of the humans' hasty retreat from the island, sat a small pallet of canned vegetables and fruit, still wrapped up tightly in clear plastic cellophane with labels that had become faded and indiscernible in many places.

Rat had suspiciously pierced the packaging with the razor-like claws on his hands, withdrawn a single can, and bit into it, his teeth shredding the hard metal of the container as though it were made of paper. He contemplated the flavor as he chewed both the metal of the can and the food inside alike before turning to them and nodding.

"Peaches," he said, clear syrup dripping down his chin, and tossed the can to Bridget.

Her mouth began to water almost instantly as the scent of fruit and sugar flooded her nose with enough intensity to make her go weak in the knees. She tilted the can into her mouth and felt the room-temperature, sticky fruit fall into her open maw. She practically groaned in pleasure as she chewed, handing the remainder of the can and it's contents to Damien. Damien likewise ate the preserved fruit, allowing himself a rare smile as he swallowed. He handed the empty can back to Rat, who tossed the whole thing into his oversized jaws, crunching it between his teeth and grinning in appreciation.

"How did you find it?" Bridget asked breathlessly, still slightly overwhelmed by the pleasure of sugar on her tongue.

"The cat," Damien said simply, pointing with his walking stick at the edge of the cardboard pallet. They could see the faintest traces of claw marks on one corner where an animal had tried and failed to break through the packaging. "She found it some time ago, but gave up trying to get at it."

"See?" Bridget glared at Rat, bracing her hands on her hips, "That's why we don't eat cats."

Rat shrugged unapologetically. "I would still take peaches _and_ cat over just peaches."

"You would take broken glass and peaches over _just peaches_."

Rat made a show of contemplating her accusation before clicking his large pointed teeth and winking at her. "Mmmm... Yep."

It took awhile, but they managed to make their way out of the basement without leaving any of the cans of precious food behind. Amongst his layers and layers of rags, Rat had several articles of clothing that could be fashioned into satchels with the right amount on ingenuity, and before long Bridget found herself trudging up the narrow metal stairs and through the shattered storefront with the heavy weight of nearly two dozen cans pressing into her back and shoulders. Rat carried the next heaviest load, with Damien managing only a few cans tied up in a old t-shirt over his shoulder. Bridget didn't begrudge them their lighter burdens. Her legs and large feet, while awkward sometimes, were extremely powerful relative to the rest of her body, and she could carry more weight than either of the boys combined.

Bridget was surprised to find that a moderate wind had kicked up in the short amount of time they had been in the store's basement. Dust and paper and any article of litter light enough to be carried in the air blew by her lazily, headed south, downtown. It hadn't smelled like incumbent weather was due anytime soon, but her nose had been fooled before.

"Weird wind," Rat muttered, and Bridget was glad to know that she was not the only one to notice.

Damien emerged last from the storefront, leaning heavily on his stick and panting slightly from the effort of getting back up the stairs on his twisted leg. Pressing on the wooden pole with one hand, there was a rhythmic, dull thumping noise as his crutch met the dust and trash-covered sidewalk.

Apparently even Damien, who's hearing and sense of smell were not better than any average person's, also noticed the bizarre and sudden nature of the wind, and gazed up through his dark sunglasses, squinting slightly as though to make out the source of the odd weather. He seemed about to comment on it too, when his pole struck something that was not concrete. It made a sharp, metallic rap as the wood hit it, and each of them looked down, taken off-guard by the noise.

"What is that?" Damien said, poking the object again with his walking stick. Again, it produced the same odd pinging.

Bridget watched as Rat leaned down and pushed bits of refuse and dirt away until he found the source of the noise. It was small, flat, and circular, and Rat picked it up in his slender, delicate hand, eyeing it quizzically.

It looked almost like a large coin, but instead of both sides being flat, one was rounded and convex and smooth. Rat frowned and spat on it, rubbing the moisture of his saliva into the layers of caked-on dirt and grime with his thumbs. Slowly, the accumulation of years of filth began to break away, and Bridget could see color beneath. Finally, enough dirt had been cleaned off for Rat to see the object unobscured. He made a face, then turned the small disc to show his comrades.

It was a badge of some sort, fashioned of metal that had been colored with layers of shiny, chrome paint. It had been scratched badly across one side, but that did not make it difficult to make out the insignia that took up the whole of the object's surface. It was a black 'X' against a field of red.

Bridget felt her mouth part slightly as recognition and understanding hit her like a stone falling on her head.

"X-Men," she whispered, her voice clenching in anxiety.

"Dead X-Men," Damien added.

They had all heard the tales of the battles that had taken place on the island in the early days of the war. Indeed, evidence of the fighting could still be seen all over the ruined city. Scars and craters in the faces of the buildings and the streets themselves marked where explosions and energy blasts of every type had scoured the landscape. Entire city blocks had been reduced to rubble and twisted ruins. There were even bits of abandoned machinery from the terrifying, but thankfully mostly extinct, mutant-hunting robots called Sentinels that had been felled during the fighting. The older mutants told hushed stories of the X-Men, a group of mutants who had banded together when the world was busy coming apart, and had laid down their lives for their fellow Children of the Atom. It had not worked, of course, and the mutant renegades had been hunted to the last man, or so it was said. Even still, Bridget had some difficulty believing even a fraction of what the adults told her. It all seemed fanciful, too good to be true, like most of the stories they shared when the sun had gone down and the lights had gone out. This badge was the first piece of real, tangible evidence that she had ever seen that the legendary X-Men had really existed at all.

Rat frowned and clenched the small disc in his fist, and turned away. He cocked his arm, ready to throw the object back into the street.

"What are you doing?" Bridget asked.

"Getting rid of it," he said, looking back at her, "You know what the Dukes do to anyone who even talks about... Them. Imagine what they'll do if they see this."

Bridget hopped the short distance to Rat and snatched the badge out of his hand. Her comrade looked at her, not comprehending and slightly agitated.

"We won't show them," she insisted, cradling the object, "We'll hide it."

Rat and Damien exchanged glances.

"Why?" Damien asked.

It took Bridget a moment to answer, because, in truth, she was not entirely sure herself. What Rat said was true enough; Being caught by one of the Dukes' lieutenants with it would land them in a heap of trouble. Even being young mutants, who were generally granted a level of freedom and immunity from punishment, would not save them. Even discussing X-Men was done where the Dukes' lackeys could not hear. The adult mutants even hesitated to mention streets that had unofficially been renamed in memory of the fallen warriors, despite the fact that those monikers were generally in common use and accepted.

She looked again at the disc of smooth, polished metal. Even after the abuse it had apparently taken, it gleamed in the day's light, almost defiantly.

The voice of Mona, one of Bridget's first protectors and a member of her mutant 'family' crept into her head. Mona was not much older than Bridget, but she had been her age when the worst parts of the war had started. She had even seen bits of it first-hand.

"We all felt like utter fools when the real fighting started. We felt like we had been duped. You see, before Terminus, we really believed that things were going to get better. Hell, things _were_ getting better. But then the killing and the rioting started and... Well, you know the rest. It was the X-Men who tried to hold it all together. When mutants and humans were at each other's throats, they were the only ones with the stones to stand in the middle, demanding peace. Even when the armies and the radical human groups killed them or took them prisoner, even when mutant extremists declared them race traitors and openly decried their cause, they stood firm. They probably saved more lives than any single group during those times, and all they got for their trouble was spit on from both sides."

"What happened to them?" Bridget remembered asking, enchanted by the enthusiasm with which the older girl related the story.

Mona had sighed. "They died, Bridget. And the dream died with them."

Bridget's mind came back to the present, and she looked at her comrades for a long moment before tucking the badge into her clothing.

"Maybe we can sell it," she said, having no intention whatsoever to do so.

"Who's going to buy that?" Damien asked, incredulous, bordering on angry.

"Okay, okay," Rat said, putting a hand on the other boy's shoulder, "Let her take it. She'll keep it out of sight, won't you, Bridge?"

Bridget nodded, her long ears swaying slightly from the motion. Under her clothes, she could feel the small, furry tail that sprouted from the base of her spine shudder slightly in delight. She didn't know exactly why, but something about the damaged, forgotten badge thrilled her, and the idea of discarding it was becoming more and more distasteful by the minute.

Damien clearly did not understand, but then, he did not understand a great deal of the way people interacted with the world. He had no affinity for material objects or trinkets, and barely had any interest in the people around him. Bridget and Rat were his friends, yes, but very little ever penetrated the boy's cool, detached demeanor. Like many of the mutants she had met in her life, Damien was like a wraith, a shell of a person with very little to keep him getting up every day.

"What the hell is up with this wind?" Rat asked, deftly changing the subject, but also genuinely concerned, and with good reason. The strange gale had increased in speed steadily since they had emerged from the store front. While it was not strong enough to be anything more than a mild concern, if it continued to scale up at its current rate, it would not be long before the three of them were swept up in a storm of dust and gravel and garbage. Bridget looked up again, and could see nothing. Not clouds, not a storm front, nothing to assign blame to for the wind. She did not know why, but the deep blue vacancy of the heavens spooked her more than the sight of any storm.

She was about to voice her concerns when a noise broke through the din of the gusting wind that made her heart sink and sent a hot prickling sensation running up and down her spine. It was the sound of a motor.

In better conditions, without the wind and the discovered badge to distract them, Rat and Bridget should have heard and smelled the oncoming motorcade blocks before they arrived. As it was, the three of them each snapped their heads around to face south, and let out a collective groan of despair.

There were four of them. The vehicles they rode might have been called motorcycles, but that would have been doing a disservice to the sleek, impressive machines that Bridget had seen here and there abandoned on the island. Only two of them actually had two real wheels, while the others made their progress clamorously on old rims that had been wrapped with rubber hose, rope, plastic tubing, anything that would serve in place of an actual tire. The motors of the ramshackle bikes all thudded and croaked laboriously, but seemed to have been pieced together with enough competence that, despite their tortured sound, they did not give out.

The four were driving straight at them, so there was no question that they had been seen. Had there been more warning, Bridget, Rat, and Damien would have disappeared like shadows under bright light, but now there was not enough time. Certainly Bridget had the strength and ability to make a run for it, and with her powerful legs would probably succeed. Rat was also wily enough to evade them even now. But neither of them would ever leave Damien behind, who could not hope to get away on his uncooperative leg.

"Be cool," Rat muttered, "Maybe they'll just pass by. We _are_ scavenging for them too now."

It was a nice thought, but Bridget doubted it. Only a select few individuals rode those ramshackle bikes on patrol in the abandoned streets, and they were those that reported directly to the Dukes. The lieutenants. The Marauders.

Bridget was suddenly drowned in a wash a memories so intense that she could practically feel them playing out again. She saw dimly lit faces through puffy, tear-filled eyes, one of which had been swollen nearly shut but a vicious backhand across her face. She felt hands on her mocha skin, tugging at her clothes, scratching her, pulling cruelly on her tail and long ears. She heard wicked, cackling laughter and the whimpers and cries of other girls that she could not see. She felt herself screaming. And then...

She closed her eyes, fought back a shudder, and hoped with all of her might that none of the four mutants on motorcycles would recognize her face from that night, months ago. She had only been foolish enough to be rounded up by the 'recruiters' once, but that had been enough. She had promised herself as her bruises and the soreness between her legs faded that she would not be taken to that place again, and she meant to keep that vow.

"Bridget," Rat whispered, "Are you okay? Don't worry about these clowns. They won't hurt us."

Neither Rat nor Damien knew about her ordeal. She had never discovered a way to tell them that did not make her feel instantly ashamed and weak. Only Mona knew, and even then it had required no explanation on Bridget's part. Mona had taken one look at her when she'd finally staggered back to their home, broken and bruised and bloody, and had known. She told Bridget that the same had happened to her, that it wasn't her fault, that it was over now. She had even gone through the trouble of heating water so Bridget could have a proper bath, but none of it had helped. And when the bath water turned pink as blood that had dried on her skin dissolved into it, she had broken down crying again. She had told Damien and Rat that she had been attacked, mugged for a food delivery, and that had satisfied them.

"Ho there, maggots," one of the gang said as they pulled up onto the sidewalk, their bikes whining and grunting and belching a burning smoke from their tailpipes. The bikes had been refitted to run on just about any type of crude oil, and their riders were not particular, often ransacking the dirty, rancid cooking oil from the frying machines in abandoned restaurants for their fuel. It was often remarked that, where the Marauders went, the smell of burning grease followed.

"Hey," Rat waved cautiously, being as cordial as possible, "Any word from the Dukes?"

Three of the group, who looked for the most part rather unremarkable, turned slightly to look at the fourth. From his garb and the way they kept their distance from him, Bridget guessed that he was the most senior of the bunch. He was clad in black leather that, while pieced together from a variety of sources, had been at least partially altered to fit him reasonably well. A rarity these days. Over his face, he wore a dirty, heavily damaged military-style helmet that covered his features with an opaque pane of dark glass.

"The _word_," the leader hissed from under his mask, "Is you shut the fuck up, hand over what you've got, and maybe you get away with a limp, like your friend there." He pointed a gloved finger at Damien.

Bridget's stomach turned to ice, and she slowly began to shift her body, so that the leader's view of her would be slightly obscured by Rat's bulkier frame. The mask and clothes hid his features, but she recognized the voice. He had been there. He had been among those who had...

"We were told that we were to drop off our portion of supplies to the Dukes' Tower after dark," Rat said, not yet protesting, simply stating fact. "If you just ride around taking everything from us, what are we left with?"

There was no response from the quartet other than the rumbling of their idling bikes and a sniggering laughter from the three underlings. The one in the black leather, the one that Bridget prayed would not notice or recognize her, did not so much as move in reaction to Rat's defiance.

"Hey," one of the riders, heavy-set with a face like a bulldog, snapped his fingers, "I know you. You're Ratboy." He turned to his comrades, "They say this freak will eat anything."

Their leader reached into his jacket, produced a tarnished, beaten pistol, and pointed it at Rat.

"He's going to eat a bullet," he said through the muffling effect of the glass screen over his face, "If they don't drop the cans. Starting with that one in the back. That rabbit-looking..."

The leader trailed off, his pistol lowering slightly.

_No, no, no..._

"Hey," he chuckled, tucking his gun back into his jacket, reaching up and unstrapping his helmet, "Well, I'll be damned."

The reptilian mutant, the one she had heard call himself Jeremiah months ago in that pit of suffering when the Marauders entertained their brutal, basest desires, lifted the helmet off of his head, perching it under his arm. She wanted to look away, she wanted to run, but her body seemed frozen, unable to respond. His golden, slitted eyes seemed to shoot through her like a blade as the corners of his pebbled, scaled mouth turned upward into a smile of small, pointed teeth.

"Boys," he grinned, pointing at her, "You're looking at a regular demon in the sack. Most of the girls that come to visit us at the tower just flop around like dead fish. This one, though... Getting your hands on her is half the fun. Takes it like a champ, too."

The three lackeys began roaring with laughter as they stared at her. Rat and Damien exchanged glances, then looked in her direction, questions and concern in their eyes. Bridget wanted to turn to dust and blow away into the wind. Her skin felt like it was on fire and covered in frost at the same time as her face flushed.

"Come on, baby," Jeremiah patted the fuel tank of his idling bike, "Why don't you hippity-hop over here and get my warm engine between your legs. We'll let you have all the food you want if you can hold back the tears for more than thirty minutes."

Bridget turned her head in shame, wishing that she could turn her senses off, wishing that she could drown out the sound and sight of the reptilian mutant. She pulled her arms in around herself and... Felt something in her jacket.

It was the badge, she suddenly recalled. The X-Men's badge. The thought of it twirled in her mind, strong like a beacon, like a shield. She thought of the X-Man, the warrior that had died wearing it proudly. A new kind of warmth awakened in her chest, small and delicate, but not like the hot bath of embarrassment and weakness that she had been drowning in moments ago. Bridget turned her head back, sniffed back the tears that had begun to form in the corners of her eyes, and looked at Jeremiah.

"Fuck you, you disgusting, rapist scumbag." Instantly she regretted saying it, did not even know where the courage to speak those words came from.

In the next moment that passed, if not for the wind, Bridget would swear that she could have heard a cricket sneeze. No one moved as Jeremiah's face stiffened in surprise and shock.

Damien and Rat were the first to react. They weren't fighters by nature, about as far from it as two people could be, but they had heard the accusation, had seen the pain in Bridget's eyes, and without a word passing between them, they moved closer to her, shielding her with their bodies, glowering at Jeremiah.

To everyone's amazement, Jeremiah's face once again contorted into a grin.

"I was gonna treat you nice this time," he whispered between his pointed teeth, "Not anymore." He looked at the other three members of his crew. "Kill the rat and the cripple. Cut her tongue out, but leave the rest for me.

Bridget braced herself for the impending violence, screwing her eyes shut. It would never come.

The blast of sound hit them all like a shot from a canon, like an explosion, like the world itself was coming apart. It rocketed down the concrete canyon from the north, kicking up dust, overturning cars, ripping through the narrow space like a wave of invisible destruction. Out of sheer instinct, Bridget dropped to her knees, covering her sensitive ears, crying out in pain as the roar threatened to blow out her eardrums. Rat and Damien followed suit, each covering another's body with their arms and hands. Out of the corner of her eye, Bridget saw Jeremiah curse and dive off and behind his bike. Two others followed suit, but the third, the one with the bulldog face, was slow to react. A block of concrete kicked up in the maelstrom, skipped over the top of a car, and caught him square in the forehead. Even over the din, Bridget could hear the sickening crunch as the mutant's head caved in from the impact. The rest of his body slumped over his motorcycle, overturning it.

"What the fuck is that?" someone cried out. Bridget could not tell who.

Almost as suddenly as it had started, the blast died down to little more than a passing breeze once again, in its place was a peculiar hum that, while not quite a noise, seemed to encompass everything, shaking the very ground with the depth of its frequency, making every other sound seem distant and fuzzy. Dust and debris clouded the air, invaded Bridget's nose and mouth, and she sputtered back a cough. Clearing the dirt from her eyes, shaking it out of her hair, she cautiously looked up, to the north, where the destructive roar had originated.

"Oh... my... God..." was all that she could manage. Rat and Damien followed suit, each sucking in a gasp as they beheld the sight that greeted them.

It was huge. Enormous. Gigantic. None of the words Bridget knew seemed to be adequate. It loomed in the sky, bigger than any building that still stood on the island, too impossibly large to fly, and yet that was exactly what it was doing. It was hard to see clearly at first, as though it was somehow hiding behind the sky itself, but the longer they looked, the clearer it became, as though materializing out of nothing.

It was an airship, Bridget realized. It was _the_ airship. The vehicle that Sinister had promised in his broadcast that he would travel by. But this was unlike anything she had witnessed in her short life. She had not really known what she had expected, but the monstrosity that took over the majority of the northern skyline was almost too much for her to process. It seemed to shimmer in a dozen colors, it's shape was smooth and sleek like an insect or... She did not know what. Along its surface, lights twinkled and shone like fireflies. Bridget felt her knees go weak as the sight of something so massive floating in the sky sent a wave of vertigo down her spine. She had always felt small in the city, but this made her feel infinitesimal. Like a speck under a giant's boot.

"It's him!" she vaguely heard Jeremiah shout, his voice quavering, panic-stricken, not at all the cool, threatening tone that he had used before.

"What do we do?" another of the Marauders cried out.

"We get the hell out of here!" Jeremiah spat, leaping onto his ramshackle motorcycle, revving the engine.

"What about them?" the other lackey asked, pointed at Bridget and her comrades.

"Fuck 'em," Jeremiah shouted, "We're getting back to the tower!"

The sputtering of the engines on their bikes, once loud and fear-inducing, now seemed like the helpless gurgling of a child as the three remaining Marauders peeled out, leaving nothing but dust in their wake. Moments ago, Bridget would have been thrilled to see them ride away. Now the concept seemed strangely irrelevant in the face of the flying... _thing_ that had appeared in the air above the island.

"Has anyone ever seen anything like that?" Rat asked, breathless, as though he had just finished running.

"Once," Damien quipped, "In a nightmare."

Without even thinking to do so, Bridget felt her hands reach out and grab onto her friends, clasping her fingers around theirs. Her limbs began to quiver in fear, and she was not at all ashamed of it.

Mister Sinister had arrived.

* * *

_**I think I'll keep my ramblings at the bottom of the chapters this go around, so you don't have to read them if you don't want to.**_

_**It took awhile, but I've finally got quite a bit of material amassed, so the next few chapters should come out fairly quickly. Chapters 1-4 all happen at roughly the same time in the story, so I was skipping back and forth between them when I was writing, as I wasn't sure what the best order for them would be.  
**_

_**Hope you guys like the new characters. I do. There are a few more introductions coming up, some of which I think diehard fans of the show will really enjoy, so stay tuned!  
**_

_**Hori out.  
**_


	5. Blank Slate Blues

_Do not stop walking._

The sun baked her bruised and tattered skin, feeling more like hot needles being pressed into her back, neck, and shoulders. Every joint, every muscle, every bone pulsed with pain, dark and thick like a rotten sludge pumping through her veins. Her body screamed and pleaded for her to stop, to sit down, to rest, but she knew that was not an option. She didn't know where she was going, but she knew one thing for certain: If she stopped, she would die.

Her world, her entire universe consisted of only two ideas: Moving her left foot, and then moving her right. Nothing else even factored into her mind as she dragged one appendage in front of the other in a seemingly endless cycle, her bare feet scraping through the rough terrain. She had the odd notion that she had owned boots at one point, but what had happened to them was as unimportant as it was mysterious. Her limbs quaked, her ligaments were on fire, her breath came in short, stunted gasps, but still she pushed on. Her skin was adorned with dozens if not hundreds of superficial wounds, bruises, scrapes, cuts, and every other conceivable manner of injury in various stages of repair. When she felt her face, she found a mass of hardened blood and burnt, cracking tissue where skin and one eye ought to have been. Nevertheless, she trudged forward, ignoring the pain it caused her.

When she had first begun her trek, when exactly that had been she could not fathom, her left knee had sent daggers of agony streaking into her brain. The joint would shift back and forth, grinding the bones together through cartilage that had been crushed and broken. Now, the pain was still there, yes, but the joint itself no longer felt quite so precarious and fragile. Somehow, it had managed to repair itself just enough for walking to be tolerable. In fact, all of her wounds, against what little information she could conjure in her mind regarding the human body's ability to heal, had each mended themselves just enough to bear movement. And so she kept walking.

Exactly how long she had been trekking through the desert was a mystery to her. Her earliest memories of the journey did not distinguish between day and night, did not offer any reference for the passage of time, did not even serve to tell her exactly how she had ended up in the desolate landscape in the state she was in. It seemed to her that the entirety of her existence consisted of only simple concepts; Walking, and the pain that walking brought her.

Still, she knew that she could not stop. A voice in her head told her as much. Ordered her to move. Shouted it at her, even. Moving meant living, and she would drag herself by her broken fingernails, crusted in brown blood and scabs, to keep herself alive. It was vitally important that she get out of the desert and find... What?

_Anything. It doesn't matter. Just do not stop walking._

She wondered how long it had been since she'd had water. Certainly longer than a human ought to be able to tolerate. Her lips were dry as paper, cracked and blistered where they were not broken by deep, dark splits in the flesh. Twice in the past two days she had endured headaches so intense that she had felt her body lapse into a momentary seizure-like state. Once she had even dropped to her knees in a puff of brown and yellow dust and dirt, nearly delusional with dehydration and exhaustion, sobbing and pleading with the heavens to let her die. Her body and subconscious mind seemed to have other plans, however, and no matter how depleted she felt, her internal systems found a way to coax her protesting muscles into walking again. It seemed at times as though her present mind and body were separated, with her limbs operating mechanically, and of their own volition.

She had to keep going. There was nothing in the world that would keep her from escaping the desert.

A slight variation in the light that beat down on her head caused her to look up in time to see a bird, a buzzard, pass over the pulsing, white-yellow light of the sun. It was a carrion bird, an eater of dead things, and it had been following her now for the better part of a day, eagerly awaiting her demise. It had made the mistake of landing near her only once, and she had nearly caught it around its puckered, featherless neck as she made a desperate leap towards it, thinking of nothing else but sinking her teeth into the animal's flesh, tearing it apart and drinking its fluids down. It was a feat of strength and speed that had surprised both of them, and the bird was not likely to make that error again. It would circle above her until she was safely dead, which, it seemed to think, would not be long now.

_I'm sorry to disappoint you,_ she thought, sneering as she looked up into the harsh light, squinting her one eye against the brightness.

Her bare foot touched something hard and blistering hot and not at all like the dirt and rock of the desert landscape. She stopped and looked down.

It was a road. Or rather, it had been a road at some point. The asphalt was so cracked and riddled with holes and gaps that it resembled a shattered pane of blackish gray glass more than an unbroken strip of pavement. She bent down, her knees and hips popping and crackling loudly in response to the unfamiliar motion, and instinctively smelled the strange material of the blacktop.

_Black_... Something about the word, the color, stirred something in her. She shook away the vague memory and again smelled the surface of the road.

Nothing. At least, nothing recent. She detected old motor oil, machinery, animal carcasses long since rotted away, but no living thing had passed by in some time. She could feel something though. Something vibrated in the palms of her scabbed, ravaged hands.

She turned her head and peered down the highway to where it disappeared in the distance in a shimmer of heat beating down on the horizon. She could see nothing. In the other direction, the road curved slightly and veered behind a steep slope of rock, allowing her a view of only a few hundred feet down its length. The vibrating in her hands grew more persistent, and now she was certain that she could hear something. Part of her insisted that it must be a car, but that seemed entirely unlikely. By the smell of the asphalt, a working car had not passed this way in a very, very long time.

Another living creature, bruised and battered as she was, might have turned and hobbled away as the sound and vibration increased as whatever produced it grew closer. She felt no such inclination, and instead turned to the face whatever might emerge from beyond the curve in the road. She might be injured, starving, and delirious from dehydration, but she was not about to turn back now. Nothing would stop her from escaping the desert. A low, menacing growl bubbled out from the back of her throat, it's strained, crackling tone only reminding her of just how depleted she was, and how vitally important it was that she not be stopped. She _could not_ be stopped.

It turned out not to be a car, but rather a tall, boxy mobile home that thundered down the cracked and broken highway at high speed, with wheel wells that had been heavily modified to accommodate the large, heavy off-road tires that handled the poor road conditions with relative ease. The vehicle itself had seen better days, with decals and stickers that had long ago been bleached almost totally white by the sun. She could see even at a distance that the white plastic and metal body of the exterior was cracked and stained in a dozen places, with repairs done hastily with tape or wire or industrial adhesives.

For a moment, she felt herself relax, but quickly realized that the driver had made no indication of slowing down, and the distance between herself and the RV was closing quickly. Instantly, she knew why. Between the deplorable condition of the windshield in the vehicle's cabin and the thick layer of mud and dirt and blood that covered her, she would likely be almost impossible to see in the shimmer of the day's heat.

Without thinking, she turned quickly on her injured leg, forgetting the weakened state of the knee joint, and instantly regretted it. She felt a pop deep in the still-healing bone and tissue, and felt the nerves sing with pain as the muscles gave way beneath her. She crumpled to the ground, already clawing at the blacktop with her fingers to pull herself away from the middle of the road, but it was too late. The mobile home was nearly on top of her, barreling forward at close to sixty miles per hour. She felt one fingernail crack in half as she dragged her body along the broken surface of the abandoned road.

The sound of the large vehicle's brakes were like music to her ears, despite the shrieking cacophony they emitted. The weight of the mobile home shuddered forward noticeably, the front of the carriage dipping as the tires skidded and sputtered along the ramshackle road. Still, the weight combined with the speed of the vehicle was too much. Even in her state, she knew instantly that the physics would not work; There was no possible way it would come to a full stop before it reached her. Not intending to wait for fate or chance to intervene again, she took those precious extra microseconds the driver's braking had afforded her, used her last remaining reserves of strength, and flung her body off of the highway with a grunt and a thud. The mobile home's oversized wheels came so close to her feet as they skidded by that she felt the material of her shredded pants snap in the sudden tug of air.

It took the hulking RV another dozen yards or so to come to a full stop, and she could hear the engine sputter and cut out in protestation at the sudden and undeserved abuse. The whole frame of the mobile home seemed to creak in relief as the forward momentum subsided, and the weight equalized onto all four wheels again.

She felt her knee, the weak one that had popped again, and could detect with her fingertips where the joint had become maligned. She gritted her teeth, grasped the bottom half of her leg in both hands around the calf muscle, and twisted. The kneecap slid back into place with a sickening shift and an audible crunching sound, and she sucked air in between her pursed lips. Not taking time to assess the overall health of the still-questionable joint, she pushed herself back up to a standing position, her jaw bunching several dozen times in the span of seconds as she chewed on the inside of her lip, pushing the agony down. Her body was spent, her muscles felt like jelly, but whoever got out of the vehicle was not about to see her splayed out on the side of the highway like road kill.

That RV was her most recognizable ticket out of the desert, whether the owner liked it or not, and she would be able to make that point much more convincingly from her feet.

* * *

Olive Macintosh had always considered herself an excellent driver. From the age of nine or ten and onwards, her father had let her handle the wheel of all manner of vehicles around their sizable property in what was formerly the state of Washington, and for the next three decades onward, she had become uniquely proficient at operating just about anything with wheels. Part of it was experience, and part of it was her unique gift that allowed her a preternatural knowledge of all things mechanical The only reason she had allowed Marcus to help himself to the driver's seat of the ancient Winnebago was the fact that he owned it, and even then it had taken a great deal of her self control to not simply push him aside.

So when Marcus slammed on the brakes, cursed, and twisted the steering wheel erratically to the left and right, causing the vehicle's ragged engine to sputter and finally choke as they skidded to a halt on the cracked, sun baked highway, it was all she could do to voice her consternation with a withering glare, and not more.

"Jesus, did you see that?" Marcus hissed, rubbing his close-cropped orange hair with his hand as he panted from the sudden release of adrenaline. "She came out of nowhere."

Olive hadn't seen anything. In fact, she was fairly certain that she had actually been dozing in the passenger seat when Marcus had made his less-than-graceful stop. They had been driving now for almost eight hours straight. Even if she had been awake, the non-functioning wiper blade on the windshield coupled with the constant haze of yellow dust that permeated the landscape here had made the glass tinted with a layer of debris that was almost impossible to properly see through. It was no wonder Marcus had nearly hit something.

"That's what happens when you don't stop to clean the windshield," Olive huffed. The truth was she had never thought too much of her traveling companion. He was a nice enough guy, but his scatterbrained nature couple with his awkward, lanky body and his awkward, pale complexion had always made him something of a non-factor in her mind. He was certainly the last person she would have thought to make a last-ditch run across the country with, but with nothing of their former community of nomads remaining besides burned cars, dead bodies, and the horrible, hungry-eyed monsters that almost half of their friends and family had become... Well, there was literally no one else. In truth, Olive had always imagined that leaving the American wasteland to try and find a mutant community somewhere on the east coast might be the thing to do. She and Marcus were the only mutants that she was aware of in the entire region, and while she was not certain that anyone in their caravan would actually do anything if they found out, it had always made her uneasy. Now, it was the only choice they had.

If Marcus was upset or offended by her criticism, he did not show it. He only peered out of the Winnebago's cabin, cupping his hands over his eyes, trying to see out into the bright light of the blazing desert that surrounded them in all directions.

"There, there she is!" he said, pointing a finger at a specific spot on the glass.

"Who is 'she'?" Olive frowned as she begrudgingly put her face to the windshield to better see outside. "Did you almost hit a coyote or a-"

Olive froze, gulped, and turned her head to stare at Marcus for a moment before winding up and punching him roughly in the top of his shoulder.

"You almost hit a girl? You jackass! Get out and help her!"

"Wait!" Marcus groaned, sucking on his lower lip and massaging the flesh where she'd charley-horsed him, "There's something wrong. Look."

Olive pressed her face to the glass again and looked.

Marcus was right, partially. Though there was nothing specifically 'wrong' about the vague figure of a girl that stood a few dozen yards off, there was something about it that was mildly unsettling. She, whoever she was, stood perfectly still by the side of the highway, not approaching them, not signaling in any way, simply standing. That alone would not normally have struck Olive as all that unusual, but coupled with the fact that she was certain that no settlements or caravans existed within fifty miles of their current location, and she suddenly knew that there was indeed something wrong, if not with the girl, than with her simply being there.

"Where the hell did she come from?"

"My point exactly," Marcus said, and reached into his jacket and produced the revolver that hung at his side. Olive had serious doubts that Marcus had ever fired the weapon in defense, or that it even worked after the years of neglect in the desert, but normally she ignored its presence because it made him feel better. Not this time.

"You are _not_ going to get out of this car and shoot a girl you just almost flattened twenty seconds ago," Olive warned.

"Olive, think about it. What else would have made it all the way out here if not a twitcher?"

Olive did not like that Marcus had taken to referring to humans infected with the Ominous virus as 'twitchers,' but she could not bring herself to chide him for it. In a way, she knew why he did it. It was better to think of the staggering, sputtering, violence-prone wretches as less than human, as _things_ instead of the people they had once known and cared for. As the hours had passed, it seemed less and less real. Like something waking nightmare that she might snap out of at any moment.

"If that's the case, stay in the Winnebago, start the engine, and let's get out of here," Olive said, though she hoped he wouldn't. She found the girl's presence as suspicious as he did, but that did not mean she was willing to chance leaving a potentially injured person out in the middle of the New Mexico desert.

Marcus did not answer, but hooked his free hand under his door's latch, pushed up, and jumped down out of the RV's cabin. Olive had to cover her face slightly as the sunlight streamed into the darkness of the Winnebago, and, cursing under her breath, opened her own door and stepped out into the dry, oppressive heat. She took her time, looking this way and that down the road to make certain that the girl was not the bait in some strange, overly-elaborate highway trap. She did not think it was. Such honey-pot schemes had died out when the gangs of bikers had either died off or migrated away from the scorching climate.

When she finally made her way around the front of the mobile home, her eyes first fell to Marcus. He was not posing, gun drawn and pointed the way she had expected he would be, but rather the weapon hung at his side, his grip loose around it as he stared into the distance, mouth slightly agape.

"Look," he whispered.

Olive followed his gaze to the spot where the girl was standing and gasped, stopping mid-stride and covering her mouth with a hand.

What neither of them had been able to see, what had been obscured by the dust and grit of the windshield and windows of their vehicle's cabin, were the wounds. The girl, tall and lean and tan of skin, was covered almost head to foot in burns, bruises, welts, gashes, and cuts of every variety. Her clothing was ripped and torn and filthy, her feet were bare and dark with the rust color of caked, dried blood. Her naked arms were a checkerboard of cris-crossing wounds, and looked as though she had stuck them in a shark's jaws. Her face was the most grisly to behold. Where an eye and part of her scalp were supposed to be, there was only an angry red pit of crusted gore that ran from the bridge of her nose to behind her temple, as though she had been struck by lightning directly in the face.

The girl did not move. She only stared at them with a unsettling, casual vacancy in her remaining eye, as though Olive and Marcus were simply fellow pedestrians, only passing by.

"Get the first aid kit," Olive said, for some reason feeling the need to whisper, as though the girl was an injured doe that might scamper off if spooked.

"My first aid kit is a few gauze, band-aids, iodine, and hydrogen peroxide," Marcus muttered, "How is that going to help?"

"Just do it," Olive hissed, "And water."

Marcus turned back to the Winnebago and Olive began to walk forward, almost immediately wishing she had volunteered herself to fetch their limited medical supplies. There was something animal and predatory in the way the girl was looking at her with her one remaining eye. Something about the way she stood, fully erect and expectant, as though her injuries were nothing more than a minor annoyance, unsettled Olive.

_You're still spooked from what happened with the caravan,_ Olive reminded herself, _You're seeing everything as though it might turn into something terrible at any moment._

She mustered up her resolve and raised a hand, waving. "We're going to help you. Don't be afraid."

The girl did not look the least bit afraid.

Olive stopped about an arm's length from the girl, began to lift a hand to reach out to her, and then thought better of it. If she was delirious there was no telling how she might react, even with her injuries.

"Who did this to you?" she ventured.

There was something in the girl's face, a shadow of recognition that passed through her eye that told Olive that her words were not falling on deaf ears. The girl's brow furrowed slightly, but she still made no attempt to speak. Olive could understand why; Her lips were a mass of chapped, split skin and dried cuts.

"What's your name?" Olive tried again. Again, the girl made no reply, only moved her jaw slightly, as though the question confused her.

Marcus joined them, the small red first aid box under his arm and two large bottles of water in each hand. He handed one to Olive and she unscrewed the cap. Upon hearing the sound, the girl's eye darted to the container, and a visible shudder passed over her battered body. Her lips parted and a small, almost inaudible gasp escaped her wounded mouth.

Olive made to lift the bottle, to hand it to the girl, but faster than she could have ever imagined from someone in her state, the girl darted forward, snatched it from her grasp, and brought it to her parched lips. Olive and Marcus watched in muted astonishment as she tilted her head back and poured almost two liters of water down her throat in a matter of seconds, never once even stopping to catch her breath as the liquid disappeared down her maw, occasionally grunting or snorting as water dribbled down her neck, drawing small lines in the blood and filth that covered her. When she had drained it, the girl dropped the bottle to the cracked, grey pavement of the highway and stared expectantly at the container in Marcus' hand.

Marcus looked at Olive. Olive nodded,and he unscrewed the cap, handing it to the girl who again snatched it like some wild creature, lustily pouring water down her throat much the same way that she had done with the first.

There was a long, awkward moment as the girl stared at them each in turn, then glanced at the two empty bottles.

"What's your name?" Marcus ventured. "What happened to you?"

"I tried that already," Olive whispered to him, "I don't think she-"

"Thank... you."

Olive practically jumped at the sound, having grown accustomed to the strange girl's prolonged silence. Even then, her voice was more of a strangled growl than what she had expected from a young girl. It was deep and guttural, like the stuttering purr of a big cat.

Nevertheless, the sound of her voice reassured Olive, dispelled some of the unusual aura that surrounded the girl, and she found the courage to step forward and place a hand on her shoulder. As soon as she had, she fought the urge to withdraw again. The girl's muscles felt like warm stone under her fingers, impossibly hard and sinewed. The girl eyed Olive's hand with a mild suspicion, tensed slightly at the touch, but did not withdraw.

"Who did this to you?" she tried again.

"I..." the girl began, but then her brow creased, as though she had been unwillingly thrust into deep thought. She licked her cracked lips and tried again. "I..." she looked helplessly at both of them, "I don't know."

"You mean you don't know who it was?" Marcus offered. Still he had not made any attempt to start treating the girl's wounds, but Olive could not totally blame him. The way this girl carried herself, it was as though her grievous injuries did not particularly bother her, not the mention there were far more of them that he could ever hope to treat with his limited supplies.

"No..." the girl said vaguely, touching her head as though trying to piece together the answer to some equation, "I... There's nothing..."

"How long have you been out here?"

"I don't know."

"Where are you trying to go?"

"I don't know. Out. Away."

Olive shot Marcus a look, raising her dark eyebrows. She had never actually met someone who experienced profound memory loss. It certainly seemed possible, given the severe beating the girl had obviously endured, but she was not a doctor. She had not met a true, accredited doctor in years. She was at an impasse for how to proceed. Cautiously, she placed another hand on the girl's other shoulder, and looked into her eyes. Or rather, she looked into one eye, and one grotesque pit where an eye ought have been.

"Do you know what your name is?"

The girl inhaled, opened her mouth, and for a moment it seemed that an answer might be finally forthcoming, but just as quickly her jaw snapped shut again, and the girl's features strained, screwing up in a pained expression, as though the question caused her physical discomfort. Suddenly, she lurched forward, grabbing onto Olive's forearms with hands that seemed too strong for a girl of her size and condition. Olive fought the urge to wince at the sudden unexpected pressure of the grip, and did her best to steady the girl as she made a noise somewhere between retching and growling.

Again, Olive looked at Marcus, this time with an urgency in her expression. With her eyes she put a question to him, and silently Marcus responded in kind with a visage of trepidation. Marcus was an empath, though a rather rudimentary one. By physical contact he could discern immediate details of a person's feelings and thoughts. He could use this ability to try and make sense of the girl's condition, but it would almost certainly give them both away as mutants on the run to New York. That was not information that either of them was ready to give out easily.

After a moment, Marcus shrugged, as though to say, _What other choice do I have?_ and walked towards them.

"I... I don't know my name," the girl whispered, more to herself than to Marcus or Olive, her voice painted with confusion and a little fear. "I don't know..."

"Hold still, please," Marcus said and, hesitating a moment, flexing the fingers of his hand, delicately touched a patch of unmolested skin on the girl's forehead.

Almost instantly, both parties pulled away as though an electric shock had passed between them. The girl again made the guttural noise of sickness and some of the water she had practically inhaled came back up and splashed onto the pavement between Olive's feet and her own. Marcus made a hissing noise as though his fingers had touched a hot surface, and even shook his hand lightly at the wrist, a reaction that Olive had never seen before from his power.

"Jesus," he muttered.

"What is it?" Olive asked, still struggling to both hold the girl up on her feet and also endure her impossibly tight grip.

Marcus looked at her, bewilderment in his eyes. "It's a mess in there. Nothing makes any sense. It's like someone unscrewed her head and scrambled her brain around. I've never felt anything like that."

"So you couldn't see anything?"

"No," Marcus said, seeming to recover from the mental shock, shaking his head as though to clear it, "I got two things. One was pain. She's in an unbelievable amount of it. The other is that she's a mutant."

With that revelation, things seemed to click into place. Suddenly the girl's predicament was not so mysterious.

"Honey," Olive tried to lift the girl to meet her gaze, "We're mutants too. Did humans do this to you? Did they attack you?"

The girl's condition and resolve seemed to be swiftly deteriorating, however. Her breath had become a rapid gasping for air, her eye darted this way and that, unfocused and unblinking. Olive felt more and more that the girl might collapse onto her at any moment.

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know..." she muttered, the pitch and timber of her voice rising with each passing moment. Olive was not a doctor, but she knew the beginnings of a panic attack when she saw one.

"Okay, okay," Olive whispered, feeling a sudden rush of maternal, protective instinct come over her now that the girl's plight was more understandable. She had likely been discovered as a mutant, beaten half to death, and been made to drag herself out of the desert by herself. It was not the first time Olive had been witness to such vile treatment of mutants. She drew the girl into an awkward embrace and attempted to smooth the tangled cascade of dark hair on the back of her head. "It's alright. You're safe now."

Her hand found something matted and wet on the back of the girl's head, and she pulled it away to look at it. There was dark, coagulated blood that was only barely liquid on her fingers, and more of an ooze. But what was more, there were hard, whitish chunks the size of large grains of sand that peppered the red mess. It took Olive awhile to realize that she was looking at pulverized skull fragments. The girl had received a blow on the back of her head severe enough to crush portions of her skull. And yet she walked still. What was her mutant power? Immortality?

"Jesus..." Olive whispered, "Jesus Christ..."

She turned to Marcus, who was still inspecting his fingertips where he had touched the girl, as though he expected them to fall off.

"We're taking her with us," she said, not leaving it up for debate, "She's coming with us to New York." she turned her face back to the girl and pulled her into an even tighter hug, patting her lightly on the back. The girl had begun to shudder as the inhaled, as though holding back tears as she repeated the same phrases under her breath over and over again: "I don't know my name... I don't know..."

"We're going to New York," Olive reassured her, "We're going where we can be safe. I'll take care of you."

Overhead, a carrion bird screeched and peeled off from its pattern of circling their position up in the dry heat of the desert sky, its disappointment almost palpable as it lost out on what it had earlier determined to be an easy meal just waiting to die. It gave another, shorter squawk of frustration and headed northwest, in search of new prey.


	6. Among Thieves

**_Hong Kong_**

Remy LeBeau shifted uncomfortably in the plush, leather-lined seat of the private car as it zipped soundlessly through the Hong Kong traffic. It was in part due to a back and knees that had long ago begun to deteriorate from a lifetime of adventuring, but mostly because he could never really relax in the presence of the spacious cabin's other occupant. Where once the sight of her had filled him with a nameless joy, now she instilled only a dark sensation that vacillated between shame and dread. As though she could read his mind, which he was often convinced she somehow could, she turned to look at him, eyes smoky and practically hidden under dark makeup, took a long drag on her cigarette, and blew it softly, sensuously, into his face.

Remy's nose crinkled and he began to cough, at first under his breath, but soon it was a chorus of hacking that sent particles of spittle flying unceremoniously before he could cover his mouth. He withdrew a silk handkerchief from the folds of his suit jacket and dabbed at the corner of his lips, all the while glaring at his fellow occupant with eyes that still glowed red over a field of black.

_Christ, getting old is terrible._

"C'est une mauvaise habitude," he admonished. Those were the first words they had shared since entering the car together. In fact, it was the first time he had directly spoken to her in days.

"Quoi?" she replied, meeting his gaze with a half-mocking stare, her eyes half-lidded, "Votre français est terrible. Parler anglais."

_You know damn well what I said, impudent girl, _he fumed inside his mind. Nevertheless, he made his face into a mask of indifference.

"Well," he said, "We were not all lucky enough to have a father dat cared enough to send us to de finest girl's school in France, _petite._"

"And thank heavens for that," she smirked switching to her English, which was every bit as refined and precise as her French, dragging again on her cigarette, mercifully blowing the smoke out of a cracked window rather than in his direction, "Otherwise I would be speaking the same bastardized, _creole_ tongue as you. God, even your English sounds like nonsense."

Remy turned away from her and gazed out the window, sighing audibly, idling tapping the glass with the knuckle of his aged hand. It was an old game she was playing, mocking his heritage and ancestry and accent, and he supposed he ought to be thankful that she was neglecting to use her deeper, sharper barbs on him. She was still in a relatively neutral mood.

Her own accent was manufactured, of course. A calculated effort that distanced herself as far from the Southern American origin of her parentage as possible. Now she spoke with an infuriatingly bourgeois, continental tone that made it impossible to tell if she had grown up in the former United States, England, or even France. Remy hated it, and what was more, she knew he hated it.

"Colette," he said, "Just for once, can you-"

"_Oui, oui_, father," she cut him off, flicking her cigarette out of her own window before thumbing the pad that closed it, using her other hand to push the white locks of her bangs behind her ear, "All professional tonight. I promise."

He did not know how, but even when she said it tonelessly, without the slightest hint of sarcasm, the word 'father' left her lips like a mockery. Her tongue was like a blade; cold, idle, yet always sharp and dangerous. So much like her mother.

"You know," she sighed, "You always get the same look on your face when you're comparing me to her."

Remy started as though she had reached out and struck him, and for a fleeting moment, his fists balled in anger and old, sour grief. She saw the slight movement, and her eyes blazed with a flicker of intensity, daring him to act on his violent impulse. For just an instant, Remy thought he might lash out at her, but in that second, he caught a glimpse of the light catching and refracting against the mutant shield that covered every inch of Colette's skin, like sunset viewed through a crystal. The shield would deflect anything, including her father's physical rebuke. The moment passed. He grunted and turned again to look out at the passing landscape of the glowing, chattering metropolis of Hong Kong that stretched out as far as the eye could see.

"Please..." he began.

"'_Don't mention mother_'," she finished for him, apparently already bored with the exchange, "Of course, father."

More times than he could count, Remy had thought that his daughter could do with a good thrashing to curb her incorrigible attitude. His own 'family' had certainly allowed him to see the value of such lessons in his youth. Even if he _could_ lay a hand on her though, he would not. The same gift that made her impermeable to harm was also the same curse that had seeped poison into her personality, had made her into something terrible from the moment she was born. In any case, to harm her would be to betray his long-dead love, and he would not do that. Besides, her unique disposition made the chip on her shoulder not only understandable, but entirely sympathetic. Even if it was often infuriating.

_I wonder, Rogue, if things would have been different if you'd lived to raise her with me._

Rogue had always wanted a daughter. Remy, in a fit of love and arrogance and ignorance, had helped her make the arrangements to allow for it. While she had never been cured of her inability to make physical contact with another human completely, with the proper application of training and inhibitor fields, she had eventually come to be able to love him physically as well as emotionally. Nevertheless, she had feared, not irrationally, what her powers might do to a fetus growing inside of her, but Dr Hank McCoy had reassured both of them that, with the proper gene therapy, their child-to-be would be protected from the essence-draining nature of her mother's touch, even in the womb. They had never imagined that Rogue was the one that needed protection. They had never even considered the possibility.

The pregnancy had begun with all the precision and control of a space shuttle launch. Rogue had been artificially inseminated to ensure the highest measure of safety for the growing embryo. At first, everything seemed to have been going as planned. Remy recalled with a frown that he had never seen Rogue happier than those precious weeks after the pregnancy had been confirmed. He'd always heard that women had a glow to them while pregnant. Rogue could have been a poster child for maternal radiance.

Then the sickness started.

In hindsight, Remy could see clearly that something had been terribly wrong from the start, but at the time it had not seemed all that unusual. The fevers, the weakness, the chills, doctors had assured them that, while they were unusually frequent in Rogue's case, they were not indicative of an underlying problem with the pregnancy. Weeks turned to months, however, and rather than the round, matronly figured that Remy had expected his love to take on, she had looked as pale and sallow as ever. She complained of headaches, of constant nausea, of nightmares, but still, every conceivable test showed that the growing baby was completely healthy, surprisingly so, even.

It was not until the last months that he'd begun to suspect what was really happening, and by then it was too late. Rogue barely slept, spending all hours wandering through their apartment, muttering to herself. She said her daughter was speaking to her, but only Remy took that as something besides the idle musings of an expectant mother.

Colette was among the very few mutant individuals whose mutant abilities had manifested at the moment of conception. Hank McCoy would later admit, with tears in his bespectacled eyes, that the alterations he had made to her unborn genetic structure had been the likeliest cause. He had apologized to Remy endlessly, but nothing the hulk of a man could say would bring Rogue back. Remy remembered striking the blue-furred man in a fit of grief and rage, remembered how McCoy had not even flinched when his fist struck him, so deep was his sorrow.

Colette's mutant ability was an almost perfect marriage of her father and mother's unique gifts. From Remy's power of manipulating kinetic energy, her body had formed an impenetrable and absolutely permanent shield against anything and everything. From her mother, the shield had been given a poisonous and offensive quality: It slowly sucked the life out of anything that touched it. It was what had allowed Colette to survive in her mother's body, yes, but it was also the thing that had slowly, painfully killed Rogue.

His wife's death had, of course, rocked Remy to his core, but he had taken some solace in the fact that he had a beautiful, healthy daughter to raise. He never once had held any sort of animosity towards his little girl for her mother's death. It was tragic, it was unfair, it broke his heart, but it was an accident. No, Colette's problems did not really come to light until she was old enough to speak, which, as it turned out, was amazingly young by any standard.

At first, Remy had been overjoyed when little Colette had begun to show an unique and perceptive intellect even as an infant. It was not until he had tried to teach her her first words that panic had begun to set in.

"'Daddy,' _mon chere,_" he had cooed as he cradled his daughter in his arms that had to be gloved and padded against her life-sapping barrier, "I'm your daddy. Can you say that?"

The baby in his arms looked at him with eyes that were alert and piercing, and said without hesitation, with lips and a mouth that were soft and unpracticed, "Remy."

Remy's nightmare had not even begun.

He could remember the renewed pain in McCoy's eyes as he had explained Colette's condition to him. Like her mother, Colette could absorb a person's memory and personality. The ability was significantly weaker than Rogue's had been, however, requiring sustained contact over a long period of time.

"You mean to tell me..." Remy had asked, growing horror causing his voice to crack slightly.

"After nine months..." Hank frowned, refusing to meet Remy's stare, "She's absorbed almost every experience that Rogue ever had. By the end, your wife... She was more shell than person. Colette's scans show that her mind is functioning at a completely adult capacity. Developmentally, I don't know what to say. Her mother's memories might fade quickly, or they may compartmentalize they way they did in Rogue's mind. Or..."

"Or she might go crazy," Remy had supplied bitterly, "With voices in her head dat never stop."

"At this stage," Hank had pressed, "It's absolutely critical that you still treat her as an infant. Right now Rogue's psyche is confused, bouncing through a mind that cannot comprehend or contain her presence. It's important that Colette develops along the same lines as any other child. I know it will be almost impossible, my boy, but you have to do your absolute best to ignore the adult side of her personality. Otherwise, Rogue's mind might dominate hers, doing damage that I can't even dream of. She may develop difficulty with motor skills, cognitive reasoning, she may develop a type of social autism. You need to treat her like a child. Most importantly, you need to treat her like your daughter. She isn't Rogue."

Remy had glared at Hank for that last comment, but before long he saw the wisdom in it. There were good days, of course. Joyful days when, just for a few hours at a time, Colette viewed the world like it was brand new and full of wonder, when she called him 'Daddy' or 'Papa' and she was nothing more than his daughter. Other days though... On other days he would catch her staring at him, with anger and contempt in her infantile eyes, and she would only refer to him as 'Remy'. He could successfully ignore it most days.

For a time, it seemed that Hank had been correct. The parts of Rogue that he could see in his daughter eventually began to fade, with the exception of the same shock of white hair that fell in front of her eyes when her hair began to come in, and for most of her youth, Colette had been as normal as any other little girl. Thankfully, she seemed blissfully unaware of the times when Rogue's personality would occasionally flare up, and Remy was eternally grateful for that.

At the urging of his contacts in the criminal underworld, who tended to be able to predict catastrophe with surprising accuracy, he had moved with his daughter to Europe, severing his contacts with the X-Men just in time for the conditions in the United States to truly deteriorate. His friends had understood why he could not stay and help them; Remy was one of the only people associated with the X-Men who had a young child to care for. Terminus had seen to that.

He created false aliases for himself and his daughter, and enrolled Colette in one of the best private schools in the south of France. For awhile, they had been happy, despite all that was happening in a world that was slowly coming apart at the seams around them. Then that night had come, when a fourteen year old Colette had been home for the summer. It was that night that had driven a spike between them forever.

When she had crawled into bed with him, or how long she had been there, he had not known. At first, he had ignored it, enjoyed it, even. As Colette had gotten older, she had begun to mature as all girls do, and had developed an independent streak that had stung more than Remy would admit. She had not slept in his bed, cuddled against his back, separated by the sheets to protect him from her poisonous barrier, in years. It felt good to be a dad to his baby girl again, to protect her from whatever nightmare had driven her from her own bed. Then he noticed that her hands, her bare hands, were on his skin. He could feel the almost indiscernible hum of her kinetic shield against his flesh.

"Stop dat, _petite_," he grunted, pulling away from her, not bothering to turn to face her, "You know dat's dangerous."

"I thought you liked a little danger, Remy," came her reply, snaking into his ear with an intimacy that was wrong between a daughter and her father. Her voice with thick and husky in a way that was familiar to him, and it instantly sent a wave of terror down his spine.

Before he could get up out of the bed, before he could turn to face her, he felt his daughter's hands slip under his armpits and across his chest, felt her press against his back and realized with growing horror that she was naked.

"I've missed you, Remy," she whispered, "I've waited for so long to touch you again. I need you..."

Remy felt the strength leave him, as though a gallon of ice water had been poured down his back. His daughter's ability to sap someone's strength with her barrier had never been this strong. In her day to day life, it was almost negligible, allowing her to have casual contact with normal humans, provided they did not notice the odd shimmer around her body that sometimes caught in the sun, or the strange vibration that came from her touch as her kinetic shield deflected even a casual embrace. The way her hands seemed to pull his life out of his chest... that was something new.

"Colette," he gasped, "Stop..."

"Shhh... Colette doesn't have to know. No one has to know. Just relax. I'm just making sure you can't run away from me, lover."

It was not until his breathing had been reduced to little more than evenly spaced gasps for air that she finally turned him onto his back. Almost immediately, he wished that she hadn't.

Perhaps he had genuinely never noticed it, or perhaps he had made a concentrated effort not to see it, but Colette had looked grown into a young woman that almost painfully resembled her mother. She looked like Rogue that night more than ever, as she had been the first time he'd met her. Young, pale, with dark smears of makeup on her eyes and mouth, like a mask of beautiful gloom.

"You can't hide from me, Remy," she whispered, lifting his limp hand in her own, intertwining their fingers, "You can ignore me, you can pretend Colette is normal, but we know what we both did when we brought her into the world. When she sucked my life out over months and months. Do you know what that feels like, my love? I think I'll show you."

It wasn't Colette that was speaking to him, Remy knew that. But whatever this... thing claimed to be, it was not Rogue either. This was something twisted and wrong, something born of pain and anger, a shade of his dead wife. But whatever she was, Remy knew without a doubt that she was dangerous, that if he did not do something quickly, she would do something that would haunt both himself and Colette for the rest of their lives.

She took his hand and placed it on her bare breast, and in his mind Remy was screaming, the horror of such intimacy with the body that he had raised as his daughter gripping him in the pit of his soul. At the same time, he felt even more of his strength being sucked out through his palm, felt his vision darken as unconsciousness flirted with his waking mind.

"No..." he gasped.

"Yes," she replied.

He had to do something.

With the last reserves of his strength, Remy grasped the pillow that sat beside his free hand, charged it with a feeble amount of kinetic energy, and threw it in Colette's face. It would not hurt her, he knew, but it would get her off.

Her eyes widened in the instant before detonation, and her mouth opened as though to say something, but before she could react, the pillow exploded with the force of a small bomb, sending both of them flying end over end off the bed, away from each other. A few moments later, Colette had emerged from the hole she had punched in the wall with her body, tears of confusion streaming down her face, and no recollection of the night's episode.

That very night Remy had reached out to his contacts in the underworld once again. He needed a telepath. And he needed one immediately. He remembered the horror and anger in Colette's eyes when he sat her down and explained to her what had happened both to her and her mother. It was the first time the whole story had been laid out before her. Remy had always thought that keeping it a secret from her was for the best, but the events of that night had driven a thorn between them that he doubted would ever be pulled out again.

The replies he had gotten had nearly been enough to give up on the idea altogether, but Remy had relented after much internal deliberation, contacting the only name that had come up in his search: Emma Frost, head of the New Brotherhood.

He had not liked the idea of exposing Colette to the Brotherhood. Where once they had been a fringe group of disorganized teenagers, they had evolved into something much more in the years since the human/mutant conflict had begun to peak once again. They were widely considered by many governments to be one of the most dangerous and sophisticated terrorist groups on the planet.

Still, his daughter needed help, and he owed it both to her and Rogue's memory to seek it out wherever it came.

The car glided to a smooth, seamless stop in front of the main entrance of the Imperial Hotel, and Remy gathered his cane and thumbed the pad on the door, which slid open and clicked into place. Colette made no such movements on her own side, instead waiting for the driver to get out and assist her from the vehicle. There was an unseasonable cool dampness in the air, and Remy buttoned his suit jacket against the cold, though it did little to ease the ache in his joints that surfaced whenever he felt a chill.

Colette emerged from the car with all the grace of a true aristocrat, taking the driver's offered hand delicately in her own and giving him the slightest nod of thanks before slipping a few bank notes into the front of his coat. The driver bowed graciously and ushered her towards the sidewalk where Remy waited. She wore an evening dress of dark, shimmering green with a neck that plunged much further than Remy thought appropriate. She covered herself with a mink coat draped over her shoulders, but left it deliberately and obviously open to show off her young, lithe, twenty-five year old physique.

Remy tapped his cane impatiently and curled his arm at the elbow, offering it to her.

"Shall we?"

"We shall," she grinned curtly and brushed past him, ignoring his gesture and proceeding into the hotel's lobby through huge glass doors that were held open for her by sharply-dressed bellmen who bowed deeply to her. He watched her walk for a moment, letting the anger he felt from her denial of his chivalrous intentions pass before following her inside.

_Let's get dis over with._

The interior of the hotel nearly blinded him. Every surface seemed to be gold, marble, or mirrored, and the lights from the grand chandelier bounced off of everything in a riotous display that almost mimicked a huge, crystalline sun. Remy shaded his eyes with one hand and ignored the bows from the bellmen who held the door.

"Even with half de world gone to hell, still places like dis around..." he marveled. The sheer opulence, the unapologetic audacity of such a display was almost surreal to him. In another time, the sight of such a place would have filled him with an eager anticipation for all the wealth potentially hidden inside, waiting to be plundered. Now it simply made him sad.

"Mister LeBeau."

Remy frowned almost by reflex at the sound of Emma Frost's voice, and he turned in the direction he thought it came from. He made no attempt to hide the contempt he now felt for the woman. When you were dealing with a telepath, what was the point? Even with the training he had received in masking his more casual thoughts from a mind reader, there was no deceiving Emma of the fact that he bristled with anger whenever he thought of her. She had taken Colette in under the pretense of curing her of her mother's poisonous remnant, and while she had done that, she had also recruited her into the Brotherhood and, Remy suspected, been campaigning against him secretly for years. He had only accepted membership himself when it became clear that there was no talking Colette out of it.

Still, Emma could not be dissuaded from pleasantries and smiled warmly at him, even as she draped an arm around Colette's waist in a territorial, motherly way. She stepped towards him and kissed the air over each of his cheeks, squeezing him lightly on the shoulder.

"So glad you could join us," she grinned.

The first time Remy had seen Emma Frost, he had been taken aback with surprise. He had known for a fact that she was, in reality, a year or so older than he was, but she appeared then as she did now, not a day over twenty five, with smooth, milky skin that looked as though it had been poured into the low-cut white dress that she wore, the entire surface of the garment glittering to the point that it made Remy want to close his eyes. Her white-blonde hair had been styled up, as was usually her custom, exposing shoulder and neck that were as shapely as they were ghostly pale.

It was all a lie, Remy had to remind himself. Frost was projecting this image of beauty in his and everyone else's mind for no other reason than vanity. Of course, she would argue that she needed to project an image of power and mystique, but Remy was not fooled. She was an old woman who could not bear the aging face that looked back at her in the mirror.

"Dis had better be important, Emma," Remy warned, "It's not wise for de inner circle to meet all together like dis."

Emma and Colette exchanged glances and smiled at each other, and Remy felt his fingers tighten over his cane.

"What?"

"Remy, Remy, Remy..." Emma _tsk tsk_'d him, "Give me more credit that that." She raised a hand to gesture at the hotel lobby. "I own the building."

"Now then," she turned to Colette, "Shall we?"

* * *

The penthouse that Emma occupied took up the entire top floor of the building, which made it closer to the size of a large house than a hotel room. It was, thankfully, not nearly as brightly lit as the lobby had been, the only lighting coming from recesses in the walls that emitted a dim orange wash of illumination, but it was every bit as luxurious as Remy would have expected. While Charles Xavier had never deigned to use his mental abilities for personal gain, Emma was not nearly so noble, and had manipulated her way to a massive fortune, using dummy corporations and underhanded stockbroking techniques to take at least partial control of several very well funded companies. The penthouse was an exercise in the marriage of old and new style, with the latest technological advancements tucked away and hidden beneath the facade of leather and lacquered wood and Persian carpets until they were needed. Overall, it conveyed exactly the message that Emma had intended: Power.

It was dark enough that Remy could not easily make out the features of the three mutants who had been awaiting their arrival by sight, but he could pick them out easily enough by their silhouettes. Upon their entrance, the two figures who sat at the large, round table at the center of the penthouse's living space looked up. The third, who sat at the grand piano in the far corner drumming through several lines of Mozart, glanced in their direction but a moment before returning to the keys.

"Remy and Colette LeBeau," Emma announced, placing her hands on Colette's shoulders as though to show her off. It consistently shocked Remy as to the extent that Colette had become enamored with the woman. She wouldn't have tolerated that sort of posturing from him.

One of the figures at the table stood and made his way to them. Before he reached the light of the penthouse's open doors, Remy knew who it was. His posture was slightly bent, and he bounced gently with each step, as though his limbs were made of rubber. Which was actually not far off from reality.

"Tolansky," Remy nodded.

Todd Tolansky, or Toad as he had been known in the old days, emerged into the light. Though, as had always been the case, the light was no particular friend to him. His skin was the pale grey-green usually reserved for flesh that was dead and putrid, and always had a sickly, damp look to it. He had learned to dress himself like something other than a hobo over the years, thankfully, but for some unknown reason always seemed to insist on wearing suits with light colors that only served to enhance his diseased-looking skin tone. Tonight it was a light, powdery blue. The collar around the shirt already had a greasy ring where the moisture of his neck had wicked off onto it. His yellowish eyes bulged out from features that had become lean and wrinkled over the years, making his former moniker more befitting than in his youth; He truly looked like a bipedal amphibian.

Tolansky looked Remy up and down before grinning with an energy that seemed too youthful and manic for someone near sixty years old. He reached out a thin, gnarled, deceptively strong hand and shook Remy's vigorously.

"Gambit, a pleasure as always, ya Cajun mook," he laughed, clapping Remy good-naturedly on the shoulder. Of everyone in the room, Remy was always rather surprised to find that Tolansky was the one he least thought needed a smack across the head from time to time.

Abruptly, Tolansky's head and neck spun quickly around, and the spry old mutant eyed Colette long and hard, drinking her in. Remy didn't begrudge him that. Tolansky, unlike Emma Frost, was harmless in his coveting of his daughter.

"Madamoiselle," Tolansky said, butchering the accent, did a sort of bow and extended his hand out for Colette. Remy almost laughed out loud when he saw the way she blanched at the sight of his pale, dewy hand, with fingers like long, hard tree roots.

"Mister Tolansky," she muttered in reply, opting not to take his hand. If he noticed, it did not show in his face as he bowed again, touching his chest over his heart as though she had paid him the highest compliment before retreating back to his place at the table. It was only then that the table's other occupant decided to rise.

Betsy Braddock was among the youngest of their order, only a few years older than Colette, but carried herself as though she was middle aged, with an almost constant expression of bemused boredom on her face. She did not move to greet them as Tolansky had, only nodded curtly at each of them. Unlike Emma and Colette, who had opted for evening wear, Betsy wore a dark, severely-cut pantsuit with a white collared shirt that had the top three buttons left open. Remy would not have minded in the slightest if some of that business-first attitude had rubbed off on his daughter, but that had never seemed to be the case.

"Good to see you both," Betsy said, the slightest hint of an English accent coming through in her speech, which, as always, clashed with her vaguely Asian features in a way that Remy actually found somewhat appealing. With a wave of her hand, three of the chairs situated around the table edged outward, inviting them to sit.

"Shinobi," Emma called to the figure who still plodded along lackadaisically at the piano's keys at the far end of the room, "We're starting."

There was an abrupt cacophony of clashing notes as Shinobi Shaw stopped his playing and laid his hands down flat on the keys indiscriminately with a thud.

"You're late, LeBeau."

Colette and Emma took their seats, but Remy remained standing. The last time he had seen Shinobi, he had cleaned him out to the tune of nearly three million dollars at a back room game of poker in Manila, then had been forced to kneecap the man with his cane when his consternation had turned violent. That had been almost four years ago, and Remy had hoped the incident would go unmentioned. By the tone of Shinobi's voice, that was too much to hope for.

It would be wise to simply brush the incident under the rug, but Remy would not be the man he was if he always made the wise decision.

"I was weighed down by all de money I took off of you, _mon ami_," Remy grinned, "How's da knee?"

"Healed," Shinobi snarled as he stood from the piano's bench and turned.

Shinobi dressed sharply, but therein ended the features about the man that Remy admired. His long black hair had been secured in a ponytail that draped down well into the small of his back. His suit, a semi-reflective gunmetal grey was adorned here and there with embellishes of gold in the buttons and cuffs, and his black silk shirt was left unsecured, exposing his chest down the the sternum. His shoes clicked audibly as he walked, though, despite his claim, Remy was happy to see that there was an infinitesimal, practically undetectable limp to his step in the leg that he had hobbled years ago.

"Do you have any notion of what it requires to heal a patella that has been cracked in half, Remy?" Shinobi asked, the venom in his voice thick and palpable. Remy wondered how much the younger man had had to drink already.

"No, but if you've forgotten I can break the other for you," he smirked. Tolansky let a single cackle of laughter escape his lips before covering his mouth, muffling his amusement.

Shinobi's face contorted into a twisted frown, and his exposed skin seemed to shimmer for a moment before becoming the dull color of iron. Shinobi had the ability to alter the density of his body at will, and he apparently thought the display would intimidate Remy somehow.

Casually, Remy reached into his suit pocket. Shinobi froze in place, expecting him to produce a weapon, and readying himself for an attack. Remy grinned, produced a deck of cards, and casually flipped several cards up, over and to the back of the deck in one smooth flourish of his nimble fingers before setting them down on the table.

"You wanna win your pride back, Shaw, then deal de cards and put somethin' on da table, cause no one ever won an award for beating up an old man."

In his hand, out of Shinobi's sight, Remy began feeding a charge into a single card that he had palmed from the deck, ready for the younger mutant to do something stupid.

"That. Is. Enough." Emma snapped, biting off each word. "Both of you sit down before I sit you down. If you have something to work out, do it on your own time and on your own property."

There was a long, pregnant moment as both Remy and Shinobi considered this, eyeing each other with unhidden malice. Finally, Remy turned and sat in his chair beside Colette, though he did not reabsorb the charge in the playing card tucked into his palm until Shinobi followed suit, his skin returning to its normal, deeply tanned olive tone.

"Anyone else?" Emma said, opening her palms and gesturing around the table, "Would anyone else care to waste our time and spit on my hospitality?"

In response, Shinobi leaned out of his chair, pulling a nearby drink cart to rest beside him, and began helping himself to a tall whiskey.

Apparently satisfied, Emma passed a hand over the wood in front of her, triggering hidden motion sensors, and the center of the table clicked and opened, revealing an impressive array of holographic projection systems. A map of the former United States popped into existence in the air over their heads. Remy was impressed with the quality of the image. Most holographic projections displayed their subjects in monotone sketches of blue or green. Emma's display incorporated a higher field of contrast and several colors, making it almost as good as looking at a physical image.

"As I'm sure you're all aware, Sinister has finally made his play and taken control of the Ark. Just as we had anticipated, he has declared the island of Manhattan his personal domain under the pretense of starting a new mutant nation and curing Terminus. He arrived there sometime yesterday afternoon, though no further word has been heard from him. It's safe to assume that his next announcement will be forthcoming."

"So he finally did it, eh?" Remy mused.

"Presumably," Emma replied, though not before eyeing him cooly at the interruption. "At this point we're not certain. The only thing that we do know is that Ominous has become a larger threat to humanity than had been previously anticipated. Obviously his intention is to create unrest and chaos in the rest of the world, driving mutants from all corners of the globe to his cause. What exactly that cause might actually end up being is anyone's guess, but I don't believe anyone in this room is foolish enough to think that he has anyone's interests but his own at heart."

"What is the response level from the humans?" Betsy asked.

"Shockingly marginal," Colette offered, producing her own small tablet from her purse and inputing the report she had prepared with a sweeping motion from the glass touch surface to the hologram, "Most of the hard data on Ominous was being kept under lock and key by SHIELD, and with the Helicarrier still burning in the New Mexico desert, the intel that humans have available to them is slight. As almost all recorded cases of the Tempest mutation have been confined to the broadcasting range of the Ark, most of the human government factions are treating it as a less than credible threat. But given the Ark's impressive host of communications hardware, I can't see it being long before Tempest begins to spread."

"So what are we gonna do about it?" Remy asked.

Each of the other five members of the inner circle stared at him for a moment, as though not comprehending the question.

"Nothing," Emma said finally, "The ensuing chaos from such a widespread epidemic does nothing but help us, Remy."

"Oh?" Remy said, dubious.

"Once we take Sinister's cure and put a stop to his asinine plans for species domination," Shinobi smiled, "We come out looking like the heroes on both sides."

"Indeed," Emma nodded, "Which is exactly why he have waited and watched while Mister Essex went about his megalomaniacal scheming. While he deals with the subsequent storm of attacks from the combined efforts of the remaining world powers, we slip in, relieve him of his authority over Terminus and Ominous, and let things run their course in New York."

"Oh yeah," Remy cocked an eyebrow, "We gonna take it, just like dat?"

"You know, father," Colette frowned, "It might serve you to actually read some of the Brotherhood intelligence packets that I forward to you."

Remy made no attempt to hide his scowl as he burned a hole into the side of his daughter's head with his stare. If she noticed his contempt, she did a good job of hiding it. Emma glanced sidelong at him and offered the slightest touch of a grin.

"Granted, after we lost contact with our agent on the inside, things became exceedingly more difficult to coordinate," Emma admitted, "But her service was, up to a point, valuable and commendable."

"That's what you get for putting your faith in a sociopath like her," Tolansky offered, "She was off her rocker back in the day, and she's off her rocker now."

"Getting back to the point..?" Shinobi interjected, his speech noticeably thick from the whiskey by now.

"Yes," Colette agreed, "Thank you, Mister Shaw. I will be leading a team to Manhattan Island. We will infiltrate the ranks of Sinister's recruits, obtain access to his data, and leave, hopefully crippling some of his combat capability in the process. We will reveal to the mutant population that his claims of a cure were false, that Ominous is no longer a threat, and he will be diffused by the human military."

Remy had barely heard anything after her second sentence. His ears seemed to have been stuffed with cotton as his heart skipped several beats.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, craning his neck to look at both his daughter and Emma, "Did you just say..."

"Colette will be leading the team into New York, yes," Emma said, cutting him off. "Don't worry, Remy, she will have-"

"She won't have a goddamn thing, because she ain't goin'."

"Father..."

Remy adjusted his gaze to look at Colette, who glared at him with a white hot anger in her eyes.

"Try and fucking stop me," she said quietly, with a firmness that Remy had come to know well; There was nothing he could say that would change her decision, and he knew it.

"This is why it's a bad idea to mix family and business," Tolanksy snickered, but quickly realized that his joke had fallen on a dead room and just as quickly went quiet.

Remy fumed for a moment longer before settling back into his chair, the hard wood of his cane rubbing his palm raw as he squeezed it in a death grip.

"We'll talk about dis later," he promised his daughter, who ignored him, returning her gaze to Emma.

"We have another issue to address," Emma announced, attempting to regain some semblance of order in the meeting, "An entity that I had not thought to confront until a later date, but timing has proven problematic. Namely this:"

She moved her hands out over the table in front of her, again manipulating the display, opening a new series of files. They were dossiers, Remy could make out despite his almost blinding anger, but the information was so woefully limited on each subject, the pictures so vague and blurred that he gave up trying to piece together who they were meant to document.

Others at the table, particularly Betsy and Shinobi, were apparently more informed than he. Betsy simply frowned and made a 'humph' sound, while Shinobi seemed more visibly upset, clinking his tumbler down on the table loudly, a small amount of his whiskey splashing onto the polished wood.

"Fucking Sons of Logan," he spat, "Fucking Yuriko."

Remy looked again at the holographic display, and found that he did indeed recognize some of the names and faces, if only by reputation, now the Shinobi had supplied reference.

He understood the younger man's venom for Logan's students and Yuriko, their sole benefactor now that Logan was dead; A couple of years ago, Logan and his team had been instrumental in diffusing several Coup d'Etats that Shinobi had attempted to orchestrate from the shadows in South America to disrupt the human militaries there. In truth, Remy had been doubly glad to see him fail, both for the personal pleasure it gave him, and the fact that he'd always found Shaw's methods entirely distasteful and unnecessarily violent.

How that applied to the Brotherhood's current plans, however, was a mystery to him.

"We've received unconfirmed reports that the Sons of Logan were hired and deployed by SHIELD to attempt to bring Sinister down and destroy his research," Emma said, "And given that it was Sinister who killed Logan, they probably did not have to try very hard to persuade them. It's being said that at least two of them died in the attempt-"

"Good," Shinobi interjected, "Fuck them."

Remy noticed with no small amount of gratitude that Betsy was surreptitiously using her telekinesis to slowly push the drink cart out of Shinobi's reach.

"While four of them remain in hiding, their whereabouts unknown. It has been confirmed by the teams put in charge of recovering the Helicarrier that their preliminary scans have shown no evidence of mutant corpses among the dead. So we can assume that they will be on their way to New York, also attempting to infiltrate Sinister's ranks once again."

"So why do we care?" Tolansky asked, "He'll just stomp 'em again."

"I'm not so sure," Emma said, "Sinister's prolonged silence makes me believe that they may have managed to disrupt his operations more than anyone realizes. He's an egomaniac at heart, and going quiet this long after his first broadcast seems... Unusual. It's possible, if unlikely, that they will make their way to New York and finish the job before we can obtain his research. I'm guilty of many things, but underestimating the power of vengeance and hatred has never been one of them. Logan's disciples have always been renowned for their zealotry, and I doubt that they care much one way or the other if their plans to destroy Sinister also include decimating his data. I don't think I need to explain why that's a bad thing."

"Do we know which of them didn't make it?" Colette asked.

"Miss Braddock?" Emma gestured towards Betsy, "Do we have any new intelligence?"

"Unfortunately no," Betsy replied, staring at the holographic display, as always maintaining her demeanor of cool detachment, "We can certainly hope that their leader, Vascha Aleksandrov, also called Black, was among those killed, but in terms of hard data, we have very little to go on. The infrastructure in that part of the world is a mess. It's a headache to get a cellular phone to work out there anymore, let alone try to glean information from the covert broadcasts floating out of the region. Our best hope at obtaining real information, or maybe even stopping the Sons completely, is to strike at their one remaining weak point."

It seemed that only Betsy and Emma knew what that meant, and for a moment, it was all Remy could do to exchange puzzled glances with Tolansky.

"So, Mister Shaw," Emma said, "It seems you finally have an excuse to seek out Madame Yuriko."

Shinobi appeared to have lapsed into a silent, semi-drunken stupor, but at the sound of Emma's last words, sobriety seemed to have been injected straight into his heart with a syringe. His head perked up, his eyes suddenly alive and hungry as he stared at the telepath with a sick sort of enthusiasm in his face.

"I thought you'd never ask," he grinned.

The Sons of Logan interfering with his past designs aside, Shaw had held a sizable torch for Yuriko's death for years, with only the threat of Logan's retribution and Emma's explicit orders to stay his hand keeping him at bay. For decades, Yuriko had controlled a substantial portion of the Japanese underworld, territory which Shinobi had coveted for years. Emma had forbade it under the desire to not start a war between the Brotherhood and the Yakuza. The threat of the Sons of Logan disrupting their grander schemes, it would seem, had superseded that.

"You will take her alive," Emma warned, "We need what she knows about the Sons, and potentially the leverage she may offer in getting them to stand down."

"Of course," Shinobi said, mocking indignation, "But I can't be held responsible of the old crone puts up a fight and gets herself hurt."

"Are you honestly suggesting that you can't subdue an elderly Japanese woman without getting into a fight with her?" Colette asked, and for the first time during the events of the entire evening, Remy smiled at his daughter and gave her a slight nod.

Shinobi scowled, realizing the corner he had backed himself into, and wisely decided to remain silent as he fumed at Colette from across the table.

"I believe this concludes the meat of our briefing," Emma intoned, shutting down the holographic interface with a wave of her hand. "You will all receive packets on your responsibilities in the coming days. I thank you all for coming, and hope it is obvious now why information of this nature could not be transmitted over our personal communication networks. If you'll follow me-"

"I want in," Remy said, surprising even himself with his outburst.

"Excuse me?" Emma said, her eyes narrowing at Remy's interruption.

"I want to be on de incursion team that goes to New York," he said, and turning to look at Emma, "I won't take no for an answer. I'm a member of de inner circle, and I go where I please. I have dat right."

"Father," Colette rolled her eyes, "Besides the fact that an operation like this will almost certainly kill you-"

"I'm not doin' anything else with my time," Remy snarled, "I'm a washed-out thief who spends his days reading old poetry dat I don't even like, while I wonder where the hell the world went. And I was running missions like dis since before most of the people at dis table were born. You won't find a mutant who isn't already in New York dat knows her streets better den I do. And you sure as hell won't find anyone who can get Sinister's research from under his nose like I can, even if I am older den sin."

For the briefest of moments, Colette's stoic gaze of contempt and indifference seemed to falter and she placed a hand on Remy's shoulder. She seemed to finally realize just how serious he was.

"Dad," she whispered, barely audible, her voice at once concerned and incredulous, "Don't..."

"Fine," Emma smiled, "You've made your point, Mister LeBeau." And with that she turned to leave, Shinobi, Tolansky, and Betsy following in turn. Begrudgingly, not wanting to be left behind, Colette also stood, giving her father one last pleading stare before stalking away.

"But," Emma called out from the doorway, "Please have your affairs in order before you depart, Remy. Your daughter is right, this will likely be your dying request. Consider yourself warned: This is unwise. Join us downstairs at your leisure."

But Remy would not be the man he was if he always made the wise decision.

The door of the penthouse clicked shut, and he was left in darkness, the only light seeping in from the balcony windows that allowed the limited illumination of the stars and moon to enter. He suddenly realized that throughout the meeting, he had been holding onto the card that he had pilfered from his deck that still sat on the table. He lifted the card and looked at it, having not taken the time to pay attention to what card he had prestidigitated.

The ace of spades stared back at him. Remy chuckled, then fed an overpowered kinetic charge into the object, watching it slowly crumble into glowing, crackling dust as he held it, not releasing the explosive energy he had placed within it until the molecules vibrated themselves right out of their material form.

"Well, Gambit," he said to himself, "Maybe you still got some luck in ya."

* * *

_**Well this was a big helping of classic X-Men characters, wasn't it? Here are a few notes to clear up a couple things:**_

_**-My version of Betsy Braddock, aka Psylocke, is purely a telekinetic with no telepathic powers to speak of. She is one of those characters who has been revised and re-powered too many times to keep track of in the comics, so I'm using a rendition of her that best serves the story.  
**_

_**-This 'New Brotherhood' is essentially my version of the Hellfire Club in all but name. I had wanted to include the Hellfire Club in this book, but like Betsy, the idea in the comics is so convoluted that I simply redubbed them 'Brotherhood' and moved forward from there to keep things simple.  
**_

_**Hori out.  
**_


	7. The Mortal Coil

"Did you know him?"

Vascha had been so cooped up inside of her own head that, for a moment, she did not realize that the question had been directed at her. She snapped her head around, suddenly concerned that the individual who approached her would think her rude.

The person who had spoken, a tall, tanned girl with features that Vascha thought were probably Italian, seemed to interpret the quick, abrupt movement as agitation, and took a half step back, opening her hands in a gesture intended to convey that she meant no intrusion.

"Sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to startle you."

Vascha looked down at the modest, crudely-fashioned headstone she had been standing over. It was a cross, hastily bent into shape from various bits of scrap metal she had managed to pilfer here and there from the facility. Hung across its front was a section of split wood, suspended by a piece of wire, into which she had carved a single word. It had been months since she'd erected the marker, and the Colorado sun and wind had faded it slightly, but it could still be read clearly enough: BEHEMOTH.

"No," Vascha answered finally, then, "I mean, yes. Sort of..."

She fell silent, not entirely sure if the girl would be interested in her morose tale. She did not press Vascha to continue, but did not give away any of the telltale signs of disinterest or discomfort either. She simply crossed her arms casually across her stomach, holding her elbows, and gazed at Vascha's feet.

"We were in a camp together," Vascha began again, "He tried to help me escape. Colossus got him out with a handful of other Omegas, but the inhibitor fields... His heart had gotten too weak, so with all the stress of the escape..."

Vascha felt her stomach suddenly turn sour, and she pressed her bottom lip tightly between her teeth to stop it from quivering.

"I never saw his face when he was alive. Never got to say thank you except through a foot of concrete."

She was surprised almost to the point of shuddering when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The girl hesitated, feeling Vascha tense under her touch, but did not draw away.

"I'm Ciara," she said, "You're Vascha, right?"

Vascha turned, only now really taking the taller girl in. She was Vascha's age, young, but with the grim coldness in her eyes that she had become accustomed to seeing in mutants. She was beautiful, but with an odd sadness about her, and very quickly Vascha was not all that eager for the girl to take her hand off of her shoulder.

"Do you want to be alone?" Ciara asked, "It's just that, I've been here for a couple of weeks and you and Hunter are the only other mutants here my age, but the only time I see you is out here."

Vascha laughed and gestured at her jet-black skin. "I'm harder to spot indoors."

"I like your accent," Ciara smiled. "You sound like a spy in the old vids."

Vascha felt a flare of heat start from her collar bone and creep up her neck and into her cheeks. She was grateful for the black matte of her skin tone, or else Ciara would have seen her face go bright pink for certain.

"How did you get here?" Vascha asked, deflecting the topic of conversation away from herself, "You don't have a ring."

Ciara seemed confused for a moment, then brought her fingers to her neck, which was smooth and devoid of the shiny divot of light scar tissue that often came from extended wearing of an inhibitor collar.

"No," she admitted, "I never got picked up. I probably should have been, but Logan found me before..." She trailed off for a moment before sighing. "He says everything is falling apart here. That the government is in shambles. It's only a matter of time before the States fall. My mom packed up and headed for Canada. I wanted to go with her, but she told me that she couldn't keep me safe. That I had a better chance here."

"It's true," Vascha conceded, "But it doesn't feel that way, does it?"

Ciara made a small grunt of affirmation. There was a mood of tension at X-Men's Colorado base, hidden deep in the Rocky Mountains. When she had first arrived, the taste of freedom had been enough to allow Vascha to ignore it, but the longer she stayed, the more it became clear that the X-Men, what few remained, we're no longer the formidable force they had once been, capable of deflecting nearly any threat. Mutants like Jubilee and Colossus were old, constantly battling lingering injuries and ailments, while others like the elusive and rarely-seen Nightcrawler seemed to have given up on the X-Men's peacekeeping and freedom-fighting agenda altogether. Young mutants like Vascha and Ciara and Hunter were treated gingerly, as though they were fragile, precious things. And in a way, Vascha supposed, they were.

"Hey," Vascha said, "Do you want to see something cool?"

Fifteen minutes later, Vascha had led Ciara back inside the deep, cavernous interior of the Colorado base. Most of the massive facility was kept dark to conserve energy and to give off as little indication as possible to prying satellites that anything existed there at all. The place was so big and operated by such a small number of X-Men and associated mutants that one could go long stretches of time without seeing another living soul. In a way, the dark and solitude made Vascha feel at ease. It was clearly not the case for Ciara, who seemed instantly on edge as the black-skinned Russian mutant led her down a narrow maintenance corridor.

"You okay?" Vascha asked.

"Tight spaces," Ciara laughed a little unconvincingly. "Not my favorite."

"Well, be prepared to get over that in a hurry," Vascha smirked. She reached up, unclasped the fastening bolt on a vent fixture, and swung the door open.

"In there?" Ciara asked skeptically, peering inside the total darkness. "Looks tight."

"It is," Vascha admitted. "But it never gets any smaller. It's built for people to go inside. Forge goes in all the time to do maintenance." She hoisted herself up into the passage, her skin letting her practically disappear into the shadows. "Are you coming?"

Ciara looked to her left and right down the corridor. "What are you trying to show me, exactly?"

"Don't you ever wonder what Logan and the others get up to in the areas where we're not allowed?" Vascha asked with a grin that served no one but herself in the darkness. She reached a hand out. "Come on, it'll be fun."

Ciara might have been unenthusiastic about small spaces, but Vascha had been right in assuming that it was just mild discomfort, and not a full-blown phobia. She seemed to adapt quickly to the darkness and oppressive feeling of metal and wires and pipes on all sides, pressing against their bodies. They had to scoot their frames awkwardly, squatting and shuffling their feet simultaneously while being careful not to bump their heads or elbows.

"How did you find out about this?" Ciara whispered.

"I told you, I'm hard to see inside," Vascha replied. "I've spent awhile following Forge around. He gets around the facility the most, and knows the most about it. From what I can tell, this place used to be a missile silo before the X-Men converted it. It goes down almost fifty levels."

"_Fifty?_I've only seen three or four, tops. How long have you spent in these vents?"

"I got lost in one for three days." Vascha tried to say it casually, but she had a certain amount of pride in her own resilience. She was bragging, just a bit. She wanted Ciara to be impressed.

It seemed to do the trick, and Ciara whistled under her breath. Vascha felt a small swell of warmth in her chest.

"Logan isn't exactly a mindful caretaker, is he?" she joked.

"I think he wants us to fend for ourselves, as best we can," Vascha said. "I get the feeling he's always testing us, for some reason."

"Right?" Ciara said, "It's like he wants to see what we do with all this free time he gives us."

Suddenly, Vascha heard voices bounce off the metal interior of the shaft and made a quit _shushing_ noise under her breath, putting a hand on Ciara's to signal her to slow down and move more quietly.

"This is the conference room where they usually meet," Vascha whispered, "It sounds like Logan and a few others."

As they drew nearer, they came upon a new vent entrance, bright lights piercing the darkness of the maintenance shaft in white beams. The two girls carefully positioned themselves in front of it and, careful not to get too close to the slits of the vent, peered into the room.

Logan, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Jubilee each sat around a high-tech circular table that had been designed to accommodate at least two dozen. As it was, they were spaced far apart, each having to raise their voices slightly to be heard over the distance, much to Ciara and Vascha's benefit.

"You cannot be serious, Logan," Jubilee snapped, obviously in the middle of a heated disagreement with the older man. "Rescuing children, taking them in, defending them, teaching them how to survive, that's one thing. Showing them how to kill? How to be soldiers? That is something completely different, and I'm not going to sit back and let you do it."

"By not teaching them to be soldiers, we're just hanging them out to dry, kid," Logan replied, his voice little more than a low growl. "It's time we stopped pretending that our mission today is the same as it was when Chuck was still alive."

"It _is _the same!" Colossus insisted. "We are here to defend the weak from the strong, to act as peacekeepers. To use force and violence only where no other options remain. We are not an army, and we do not go out picking fights, and we do not kill where it can be avoided." The big Russian stood, placing both of his massive hands down on the table. "Teaching children to be assassins? It's criminal, Logan. It's an assault on everything I joined the X-Men to uphold."

"Pick ze fight or no," Nightcrawler hissed, his spaded blue tail flicking like an angry cat, "We are at war, Piotr. We have all been denying it for years, some more than others. I have known what has been at stake ever since I watched my wife bleed to death in New York. Zis is an extermination, and all we have done in response is make it a little bit harder to find us. It is time we started fighting back, with every tool we have available."

"Not. With. Children!" Jubilee said, practically shouting and banging a fist on the metal table, a small chirp of her explosive sparks zapping out of her knuckles like an exclamation point. "Listen to both of you! Listen to what you're suggesting!"

"They're not children," Logan said, his voice still low and cool.

"How can you say that?" Colossus asked, visibly shocked.

"Jubilee," Logan turned to face the asian woman, "When you first saw Vascha, thirty pounds underweight, a shiv in her hands, ready to kill or take her own life to be rid of her imprisonment, did you see a child there? Piotr, when you first met Ciara, a girl who had taken to beating men nearly to death just to make money to support herself, did you see an abundance of innocence in her eyes?"

Vascha gave a start when she heard their names spoken, when she realized that the topic of conversation was centered around herself and Ciara, around all the children that the X-Men had liberated or saved from the brutal existence they had been forced into. She turned her gaze and saw that Ciara was equally rapt in concentration, taking in every word now that they had context for what was being discussed. Logan intended to train them. To teach them to fight. But for what?

"Their past doesn't make it any more right, Logan," Jubilee huffed, though it was clear that her conviction had been shaken, if only the tiniest bit. "There's no justifying this train of thought."

"I don't know if you two have been asleep for ze past decade or so," Nightcrawler said, "But mutants, our _entire race_, is dying. If we don't teach these kids how to defend and protect themselves, with violent force if necessary, if and when a cure for Terminus is found, there won't be anyone to use it on. Zat is all ze justification I need. How many more times will we save a mutant child only to hear of their death weeks or months after they have left our protection? Because I want no part in zat any more than you want part in zis."

Piotr, the Colossus, stood abruptly.

"You're right," he said. "I want no part in this." He looked at Logan. "Train your disciples if you must. I sincerely hope that you can teach them to survive. But if you follow that path, you will do so on your own. You will be welcome here no longer."

With that, the big Russian turned to leave.

Jubilee stood as well, walked to where Logan sat, and knelt beside him. He did not turn to meet her gaze.

"I am begging you, Logan. Please reconsider this. These children have no basis on which to make such a choice. You will be damning them to a hollow life just as surely as the internment camps."

"I've made up my mind, Jubilee," Logan replied in his characteristic low growl.

There was a silence in the conference room that lasted nearly a minute. In that time, Vascha was dead certain that her heartbeat was growing louder by the second, beating viciously in the top of her chest, making her throat feel tight and constricted. At any moment, she was sure that one of the adults would her the _thump thump_ of her pulse and realize that they had been eavesdropping.

Finally, Jubilee raised her hand. For a moment, it looked as though she meant to cradle Logan's head, but then she brought her palm around and slapped him hard across the cheek. It was not vicious. Not meant to injure or even really hurt him, but Vascha jumped at the sudden violent gesture. She did not know why, but it made her want to weep.

"Charles Xavier would be ashamed of you." Jubilee said simply, barely above a whisper, and walked out.

Vascha knew that Logan had barely even registered the strike. In her short time with the man, she had learned that he could endure almost any amount of pain with little cost to himself. Nevertheless, Logan grimaced as though he had been stabbed in the heart.

"It really is falling apart," Ciara whispered. "All of it. They can't protect us."

"No," Vascha replied. "But he can."

And she believed it.

"_...Sinister..."_

The voice seemed to emanate from nowhere, as though it had originated within Vascha's own head. It was a strange, unfamiliar female's voice, calling out as though from many miles away, barely a ghost of real, tangible speech. Vascha whipped her head around, searching for the source, but without reason or explanation, the world around her had become slow, foggy, as though she were suddenly being transplanted out of reality. Her grip on her own self, her own body, became suddenly hazy and loose, like her consciousness was being detached.

She wanted to ask Ciara if she had heard the voice too, but she quickly realized that Ciara was not there. Logan, Nightcrawler, the conference room, the maintenance vent, all of it was melting away, being deconstructed, as though the strange voice had begun to burn away the physical world.

"_I see you've recovered nicely."_

What was going on?

"_...Essex!"_

* * *

Laura Kinney flexed her fingers, watching the tendons of her wrist stretch taught beneath the skin as she worked the digits. It was the arm that had been hastily reattached after Vascha Aleksandrov had severed the limb with what could have only been an adamantium sword that the mutant called Rin carried. She vowed to one day wear those swords as trophies on her belt the same way she now wore Vascha's short blades. Blades that had at one time been Wolverines skeletal claws. It had been almost five days since the flesh and bone and nerves had mended themselves, and the only evidence that any injury had been sustained was a numbness that still persisted in the tips of her fingers, and even that was quickly fading.

She could still faintly detect the spot in her upper bicep where the blade had sliced clean through her muscle. It was certainly not the first time that she had experienced the lingering phantom sensation of grievous wounds that most humans could not hope to recover from, but the circumstances of this injury had made her reflect on the conflict more than she normally would have. She could remember the blinding anger that had consumed her during the attack on the Ark. The bloodthirsty rage that had fueled her actions, and allowed her to engage Logan's students with the same detached, predatory coldness that she had always felt when dispatching a target. It was a product of her training, of her conditioning, that allowed her to function with such a singular mode of thinking, and she had grown accustomed to it over the years. But as she tested the newly healed muscle of her arm and recalled the lifeless face of Vascha Aleksandrov, her body blown apart by her own explosives, she could not ignore the lingering, infuriating sensation of regret. It was not something that she was accustomed to feeling.

She again regarded the hand for a moment, which briefly and suddenly seemed a completely alien object to her mind, then thumbed a pad in the lift that would bring her down to the operation laboratory of the science wing of the Ark. She had learned from the airship's computer that Sinister had finally left the intensive care unit into which he had been sequestered until his body could fully recover from the burn damage he had sustained at the hands of Aleksandrov's bomb. Burn damage that had reduced him to little more than a shambling, shuddering pile of cracked, blackened flesh casing a scorched skeleton and organs.

She had never even considered that he might die, but his recovery time had nonetheless surprised her. His healing ability had been pilfered and distilled from the genes of many powerful mutants, including Wolverine, and should have handled the damage with relative ease. Instead, his recuperation had been agonizingly slow and painful, and had required nearly all of the Ark's capacity for intensive medical treatment.

In truth, Laura's interest in Sinister's recovery had less to do with the man and his designs and more with what his condition had afforded her. While he had been incapacitated, the ship's top level clearance had been passed on to her, and while she could not unlock the entirety of the ship's functions and the secrets that lay within, it had allowed her to exact the payment that Sinister had promised her years ago in exchange for her services, which she had only recently accepted would never be given to her willingly. The mere thought of it brought a wash of heat into her neck and cheeks, and she fought the urge to grin to herself. She could not be certain yet. It had not been long enough for the ship's computers to confirm it, but she was almost positive that it had worked. She could feel it. It was simply a matter of informing Sinister.

_Which could mean that I'm about to walk into my own execution_, she frowned. She did not think Sinister would have such a hasty, violent reaction to the news, but she could not be certain. Parts of his plans that he had believed flawless had unraveled entirely in the past week, and there was no telling how he would take her surreptitious insubordination. It was certainly possible, if very unlikely, that he would lash out at her in anger. That was okay, though. His usefulness to her was at an end now, and she would not mind the chance to finally go toe-to-toe with the man. She had never been oblivious to the idea that their constant, casual tension might one day escalate beyond their control.

_You're going to walk in there and tell him you're done_, she thought, _He has the Ark, his empire has rooted itself, there's nothing more he needs you for. Just walk away. And if he can't accept that, well..._

Guiding lights directed Laura through the corridors, and she was thankful that they did not lead her towards the hall of cryogenically frozen mutants in their hibernation pods. Sinister had often been fond of that room, but it made Laura feel nothing but discomfort. A fact that he was not ignorant to. What was more, the genome troopers had only just finished cleaning out the hundreds, maybe thousands of corpses that had been created when Vascha's bomb had shorted the power, and Laura was not enthusiastic to see firsthand the extent of the damage.

She was surprised when she was finally able to piece together where the ship's computers were leading her. She thumbed the pad that opened the sliding doors with a hiss of air, and found herself in the bay of the Ark's array of automated surgical suites; A collection of some of the most advanced medical machines on the planet. More than simple robotic arms with instruments attached that performed the finer tasks of surgery like those in the small infirmary near the Ark's bridge. In the care of these machines, a person could be rebuilt, brought back from the brink of death. It was in this room that Sinister had undergone the bulk of his intensive treatment.

But his treatment was long since completed, so what was he doing here?

The room had been kept dim, so that the observation windows that looked into the chambers where the operations were performed seemed to blaze with intense white light. Against one, she saw Sinister's looming silhouette and made her way toward him.

"Sinister."

He did not move, and made no indication that he had heard her.

"I see you've recovered nicely," she said, coming to a stop beside him, leaning forward and peering into the man's face. Again, he seemed not to hear her. His eyes were closed tightly, his brow furrowed in concentration.

Laura could not pinpoint it, but there was something that was different in the mutant's appearance, which seemed redundant, since his appearance was already "something different." Most obviously his long hair had been reduced to stubble on his scalp after the bomb's fire had burned it away, but it was more than that. His skin seemed tighter, pulled over his bones in a way that did not strike Laura as healthy. The white pallor of his head and face combined with his newly shorn locks made him look more like a living skull than a man. There was also a dryness to his complexion that had not been there before, as though his skin was scaly, as though it might flake off at the lightest touch. She reasoned that all of this was a byproduct of healing such massive burns in such a short period.

"Essex!" she snapped, practically in his ear.

Sinister opened his eyes with a start and turned to look at Laura. She had expected him to be visibly annoyed, as was his custom when he was interrupted from anything that occupied him. But this time he seemed only mildly surprised, as though she had woken him from a light sleep.

"Laura," he said, the corners of his dark lips turning upward in a small, enigmatic smile, "I'm glad you're here."

"Oh?" Laura raised an eyebrow. She found that hard to believe.

"Mmm," he hummed in affirmation, turning back to look through the window at the medical procedure in progress. There was something in his voice that was different as well, Laura realized. It was harsher, damaged-sounding. Even his breathing, undetectable as it was to normal human ears, sounded to Laura as though it came to Sinister as an effort, like a man with emphysema. The explosion, she realized, had taken more from Sinister than anyone had suspected. Perhaps even himself. He was still not fully recovered. He was weakened, even.

Laura felt a twitch in the muscles of her forearm. The muscles that triggered her claws.

She stared a moment longer at the side of the man's head before looking into the surgical suite. At first, her eyes could not make sense of it, but rapidly they adjusted to the strangeness of what they beheld, and Laura could not stop the sharp gasp of sucking air that escaped her clenching teeth.

"It was good of you to place her remains into stasis for me," Sinister said, "She is going to prove invaluable."

"I thought you were just going to sample her genetic data," Laura growled. "This is sick. Even for you."

"Oh, I did that. But I have further use for this one."

Vascha Aleksandrov's corpse, what was left of it, lay motionless on the operating table. Every conceivable medical instrument that the Ark employed was attached to her in some way or another, monitoring and measuring and calculating every aspect of the inert form. Parts of the body that had apparently been deemed too damaged to bother with had been carved away, leaving her with little more than a head, a torso, and her legs, all of which had, at various places, small chunks removed where burns or shrapnel had ruined the tissue. Her arms were nowhere to be seen, and at both shoulders there were only small, bandaged lumps.

Even those parts of her that remained were a morbid sight to behold. Almost every inch that had been preserved had also been covered in transparent, nano-infused bandages, holding her together despite broken, burned skin the color of fresh tar and bones that had been shattered into pieces. A huge syringe attached to a transparent hose had been sunk deep into her chest, while a viscous white fluid, artificial blood most likely, was manually pumped in and out of her body. Similarly, a mask had been securely affixed over her mouth, and a machine steadily pumped oxygen into her lifeless lungs, causing her chest cavity to rise and fall with a macabre, mechanical rhythm. Only one eye had been left undamaged and uncovered, and it stared, open and unblinking, towards the ceiling. Periodically, a small, delicate robotic arm would reach down from above and spritz the exposed eye with a puff of moisture, keeping it from drying out. The resulting droplets that ran down the mutant girl's lifeless cheek made it seem as though Vascha was silently weeping. Laura had to turn away.

"Is she conscious?" Laura said, her mouth contorting into a crooked snarl, the metallic taste of disgust rising up under her tongue.

"No. She's not yet even technically alive. I have put her back together just enough to jump-start areas of the cerebrum. I've been using her as a sort of test subject for my mental abilities, accessing parts of her long term memory. It's been difficult, like watching an uncatalogued, damaged collection of vids, with no real system for determining what they are until you've viewed and tagged them. Even then, the recollections are sometimes too fragmented to be useful. But there are sections that are beautifully intact."

"Why?" Laura asked. She could think of nothing else to say, and had to restrain herself from screaming it at him.

Sinister shrugged in such a lackadaisical way that Laura felt herself instantly infuriated. "A plethora of reasons. My coming empire has many unforeseen needs and difficulties, and Ms Aleksandrov's unfortunate attempt at martyrdom is no excuse for lack of participation."

"What...needs? What..._difficulties_?" Laura growled, "She was _dead. She still _is_. _Is there no line you won't cross?"

"Death," Sinister mused, "Is an oft over-estimated obstacle. It's nothing more than a dissipation or redirection of energy. If you can repair the right pathways, get the energy flowing properly again... Well, there's no limit to what one can do. Life is not special, Laura..." He paused, looked at her with a strange, contemplative gaze. "Anyone can create it, given the proper tools. It's right there for the taking."

Laura felt a sudden prickling on anxiety on the back of her neck, but otherwise maintained the same stoic, middle-distance gaze that she nearly always wore.

"But, more specifically," Sinister turned away from the viewing window and pressed something on a nearby touchscreen. Laura heard the familiar ping of a summoning chime. "I need her memories because, as uncomfortable as I am with admitting it, I was wrong about something."

A door different from the one through which Laura had entered slid open with a hiss, and a genome trooper marched in, the heels of his high-tech combat boots clicking in perfect time. The clone soldier walked to Sinister, halting three feet behind him, standing at rigid attention. Sinister turned to face him.

"Physically, they're perfect in every way," Sinister smiled, his voice still carrying the odd, strained tone that Laura had noticed before. "They never tire, never question, they execute orders to a level of perfection that can never be achieved naturally. They are absolutely loyal and will fight until their last breath if they are ordered to do so. And yet, not even a week ago, Logan's students mowed through them as though they were nothing more than common thugs."

Sinister stepped forward, held out a pale, wiry hand. "Your helmet."

The trooper immediately reached up and undid the snaps and seals that secured the insect-like mask to his face. There was a hiss of pressurized air escaping, and the faint smell of ozone and static as the sterile environment of the suit was broken. He pulled the apparatus away revealing the face that made Laura's stomach twist like a tortured snake. Logan's face, that was somehow not Logan's face, stared out, his features, his skin alike in every way to the man he had been clone from, and yet it was not at all alike. There was a newborn's softness there. Skin that had never seen daylight or injury, that would never know life's struggle or sadness that would bring with it the wrinkles of experience, seemed to distort a face that wanted to be familiar in her mind. His artificial smell filled her nostrils and made her curl her nose, she found it so offensive.

With no warning, Sinister's hand snapped forward like the stinger of a scorpion, his fingers latching onto the clone trooper's neck like an iron vice. Laura winced involuntarily as she herd the pop and crackle of a snapping trachea and ligaments that severed under the crushing pressure of the grip. Laura was secretly impressed. Even in what she perceived to be a weakened state, the man was superhumanly strong.

The trooper's face, besides immediately turning red, then a deep, unhealthy shade of purple, did not waver in the slightest as it was choked of oxygen.

"All the technology I could offer, all the modification, the purification," Sinister observed, as though he were watching an experiment conducted under a microscope, "And Vascha and her young comrades tore them apart. They made a mockery of my work. They spat in the face of perfection."

The clone trooper's hands went limp, his detached helmet clattering to the floor as he died. Even Logan's healing factor, as distilled and refined as it might have been, could not combat with oxygen deprivation for long. The only noise that came from him was a slight gurgling as Sinister released him and allowed him to fall to the floor in a crumpled pile. Laura was both surprised and relieved to find that the abomination's death made her feel absolutely nothing.

Sinister looked at Laura again. "Why do you think that is?"

Before she could stop herself, Laura rolled her eyes and shook her head. She had to try and remember that, unlike before, she no longer had nothing to lose in upsetting Sinister.

"You bred yourself a perfect tiger, then you cut its balls off," she offered. "Logan was more than a healing factor and great senses. He was experience. I told you this when you first set about making these...things. Logan was the warrior that he was because he fought in nearly every major theater of modern warfare, accumulating dozens of lifetimes worth of tactical thinking, military strategy, and special ops training. With each new age of technology, he was put through a new grinder, tearing away the parts of him that were superfluous or unnecessary. He wasn't a perfect warrior because of his claws or his body. He was a perfect warrior because of his mind. When you took the clones' ability to think for themselves away, you doomed them to fall at the hands of any decent warrior who could think adaptively."

The words came so naturally, from a place of such bizarre honesty, that Laura was surprised even as they came pouring out of her mouth. Sinister seemed to notice as well, and raised the flesh above his brow where his eyebrows had been singed off. He made no move to silence her, however, so she continued.

"Logan trained the Sons to be fighters, of course, but if I knew him at all, his primary concern would have been in their mental conditioning. Making sure they they could endure, could adapt to, and could get past any obstacle, any mental challenge, any mode of torture or handicap that could be implemented against them. The Sons of Logan tore through your precious genome troopers not because they were lucky, or because they were better warriors than the clones. They won because you presented them with an awful, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking scenario, and they flat-out didn't give a shit. There's a world of difference between a soldier who is ignorant of the hopelessness of his situation, and one that knows the odds are stacked against him and just keeps fighting anyway."

"Like yourself," Sinister offered, with the slightest hint of mocking to his tone.

"With the significant difference that I didn't choose any of this," she retorted.

Sinister pursed his lips and looked back into the operating room where Vascha's lifeless body was kept in a perpetual state of artificial vitality. "You admire them."

Laura turned and looked into the operating suite as well. "More than anything, I think I feel sorry for them. We live in a world where warfare is a valuable skill set for children."

"Not under my empire," Sinister intoned. "I mean that seriously, Laura. And it's all the more reason why I need Vascha's memories. I need access to her training, her life, what made her as good as she was."

"So you can put it into your troopers."

"Exactly. They are physical perfection, but they are only a vessel. I can see that now. Their minds must be refined as well as their bodies have been."

Suddenly, with an intense, heavy, metallic dread, Laura knew that her involvement with Sinister was not over. Not by a long shot. She had always suspected, always assumed, that he was too blinded by his own ego to ever adapt, to see errors in his own plan. She had always counted on the fact that, eventually, he would fail, and that she would be far away from him by the time he did. But his brush with death at the hands of Vascha and her team had apparently woken something in him. He had had his eyes opened to doubts, to the holes and kinks in his design. And he was already working to expunge them. If he continued down this path, there would soon be nowhere on earth where Laura could go to get away from him and his influence.

She had to stay. She had to stay in his employ. Even if just for a little while longer. She had to know what the world was about to face. The knowledge manifested itself in a knot in her throat.

Laura looked again at Vascha's inert form, her exposed eye still leaking the saline solution, artificial tears flowing down an artificially alive cheek. That was Logan's legacy, laying there on that table, mutilated and bandaged together, and soon Sinister would dive in and tear her apart, find what he needed, and twist her into something even more broken and dead than she already was. It was no way to treat an honorable warrior.

"Now," Sinister said, "What can I do for you, Laura?"

She could still do it. She could still turn away from this man, this would-be emperor. All she needed to do was say it to him: _I'm done working for you. I've given you my services, and I gave myself the compensation you promised. Our transaction is complete._

"I..." Laura began before pausing to lick her lips, her mouth suddenly feeling dry and chalky, "I just wanted to know how you'd like the boys and I to start handling the local gangs. The Duke's of New York have sent what I suppose is their version of a formal envoy asking you to meet with them."

"Ah yes," Sinister smiled, "The rats seek passage on a greater ship. Tell them we will meet them in good time."

"There's also the question of the refugees that are already arriving. They're coming in large numbers, and there is great confusion as to how to properly house and protect them, as per your promise."

"Mmm," Sinister said, "I'd like you to handle that as you see fit. Have the troopers assist in setting up some form of camp in the area surrounding the Ark. I'd like you to begin to put together a system of registering every mutant who has come to join us. Use the Ark's supplies to provide for their needs. We have more than enough to go around. Tell them to be patient, and their cure will be forthcoming."

Laura nodded and turned to leave.

"This is a special day for you," he called after her.

She stopped, looked over her shoulder. Did he know? Had he somehow guessed? She was still more than confident in the mental barriers that had been erected in her mind, but if he was going to be spending most of his time practicing his telepathy, it might not be long before he could catch the errant strands of her thoughts. That was a dangerous prospect to consider.

"In what way?"

He flashed her a thin, shark-like grin of pointed, pearlescent teeth. "It's the day you really, truly join the Empire."

* * *

_**A/N: Hey guys. Hope you've enjoyed the story so far, but as you can probably tell from my lack of updates, I've lost a little bit of steam on this one. If you would really like me to continue, please review or send me a message telling me so. I'm more than happy to keep going, and I don't want to seem like I'm doing this just for recognition by you, the readers, but if the interest in this saga has truly waned, there are other threads I can devote my time to. Let me know, okay?**_

_**Hori out.**_


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